US AP: Confidence in science fell in 2022 while political divides persisted, poll shows - “Science must be bipartisan. The causes of Alzheimer’s are the same whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. The fusion that goes on in the sun is the same whether you live in Topeka or you live in San Francisco.”

Confidence in science fell in 2022 while political divides persisted, poll shows
Associated Press (archive.ph)
By Maddie Burakoff
2023-06-15 18:52:37GMT

NEW YORK (AP) — Confidence in the scientific community declined among U.S. adults in 2022, a major survey shows, driven by a partisan divide in views of both science and medicine that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Overall, 39% of U.S. adults said they had “a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community, down from 48% in 2018 and 2021. That’s according to the General Social Survey, a long-running poll conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago that has monitored Americans’ opinions on key topics since 1972.

An additional 48% of adults in the latest survey reported “only some” confidence, while 13% reported “hardly any,” according to an analysis of the survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

The survey showed low confidence levels among Republicans as partisan gaps that emerged during the pandemic era have stuck around, said Jennifer Benz, the center’s deputy director.

“It doesn’t look all that dramatic when you just look at the trends for the overall public,” Benz said. “But when you dig into that by people’s political affiliations, there’s a really stark downturn and polarization.”

Between surveys in 2018 and 2021, as the pandemic took hold, the major parties’ trust levels headed in opposite directions. Democrats reported a growing level of confidence in science in 2021 — perhaps as a “rallying effect” around things like COVID-19 vaccines and prevention measures, Benz said. At the same time, Republicans saw their confidence start to plummet.

In the 2022 survey, Democrats’ confidence fell back to around pre-pandemic levels, with 53% reporting a great deal of confidence compared with 55% in 2018. But Republicans’ confidence continued its downward trend, dropping to 22% from 45% in 2018. Confidence in medicine has also grown more polarized since 2018. That year, Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to say they had high confidence. By 2022, though, Republicans’ confidence had fallen to 26%, while Democrats’ has remained about the same as it was before the pandemic, at 42%.


Overall, 34% of Americans reported a great deal of confidence in medicine in 2022, compared with 39% before the pandemic.

Generally, scientists have had a high level of trust compared to other groups in the U.S., said John Besley, who studies public opinion about science at Michigan State University. And even with the latest declines, confidence in science is still higher than many other institutions, he pointed out.

But the split between political parties is a cause for concern, experts said.

“You can definitely see the impact here of people taking cues from their political leaders,” Benz said.

For Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the drops were “disappointing but not surprising.” He sees them as part of an “overall pulling apart of our communities” and a loss of trust in many institutions.

The latest survey found that distrust has grown for some other groups, too. According to the 2022 survey, confidence in the Supreme Court has plunged to its lowest level in at least 50 years. Americans also reported lower levels of trust in education, the press, major companies and organized religion.

Besley said that scientists should communicate about their motives to help show that they are trustworthy: “Not only do we have some expertise, but that also we’re using that expertise to try to make the world better,” he said.

Parikh thought the stakes are high for rebuilding trust in science — and doing so across political lines.

“Science must be bipartisan,” he said. “The causes of Alzheimer’s are the same whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. The fusion that goes on in the sun is the same whether you live in Topeka or you live in San Francisco.”

The General Social Survey has been conducted since 1972 by NORC at the University of Chicago. Sample sizes for each year’s survey vary from about 1,500 to about 4,000 adults, with margins of error falling between plus or minus 2 percentage points and plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The most recent survey was conducted May 5, 2022, through Dec. 20, 2022, and includes interviews with 3,544 American adults. Results for the full sample have a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

 

[Scale Smerch]

You make it sound like the medication discovery process is pretty much like how natural remedies were found, only with more words and money involved.

It basically is. The first stage of drug discovery is literally testing thousands of chemical species in vitro (or in vivo depending) to see what works and then figuring out which promising examples meet health board requirements.

The money as brought up is in finding something that works, not in understanding why it works.

 

[Stoneheart]

Science is great. The scientific method is great. Scientists are not so great, and the "scientific community" is shit.

Thats not true. Scientists are a bit wierd, but mostly good people and the community is just boring.

The issue are communists and pseudoscientists infiltrating the system. one of the problems is that the US never got the debate on the scientific methode europe got, thats why the Frankfurt school of marxism is still around and kicking in Anglo academia. Europe ended that decades ago in a debate between some german guys.

 

[Next Task]

Thats not true. Scientists are a bit wierd, but mostly good people and the community is just boring.

Like with most of these things, the problems come from both needing money and the attendant compromises, and the scientism types who have a cargo cult understanding of what science is and does. The ethics of academia combined with the financial demands of a movie studio doesn't make for a great mix.

I learned years ago that placebos can still work even if you know you're taking a placebo, along with larger pills often being more effective just because it feels more like medicine. We don't know the answers to so many things, as @Otterly points out. So when Big Science is either telling us that some of the things we do know, like humans can't change sex, is wrong because feelings, or is telling us with certainty things we don't know, like pretty much everything to do with covid, because trust them despite any evidence suggesting we shouldn't, then it's no wonder people lose faith in what they are being told by scientists.

Also, maybe don't declare riots as fine because racism bad in the middle of a pandemic. Because it proves you are easily swayed by political pressure and/or lying about the severity of said pandemic. After that, it's no wonder Big Science lost the trust of anyone with any sense.

 

[AnOminous]

Like with most of these things, the problems come from both needing money and the attendant compromises, and the scientism types who have a cargo cult understanding of what science is and does. The ethics of academia combined with the financial demands of a movie studio doesn't make for a great mix.

Most people judge "science" by whether it confirms their preconceived notions, whether it's Young Earth Creationists or troon worshipping I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE redditards. So to the latter, any "study" that concludes that a man can magically transubstantiate into a woman by changing his Twitter pronouns is FUCKING ESTABLISHED SCIENCE BIGOT while the hundred years of previous actual science saying the exact opposite is Nazi bullshit.

 

[Otterly]

You make it sound like the medication discovery process is pretty much like how natural remedies were found, only with more words and money involved.

It’s certainly still based on that. Now (and really only the last few years) AI is getting in on the act and we have in silico work screening entire libraries of molecules. That’s is great for when you know that lock looks like and you need a key to fit it. BUT the really exciting stuff STILL comes from nature. Ivermectin was found in a microorganism on a golf course in Japan. Muscle relaxants they use in surgery? From curare toxin. Botox? Is botulinum toxin. Spider, snake and marine venoms are opening some very interesting new pipelines for painkillers and cancer drugs. Nature is the supreme pharmacopeia.

PROTIP: if the shrink has corporate schwag all over their office from the very company that makes whatever they're prescribing you, take this fact into consideration when deciding to take their medical advice.

Yeah. When I started in the business they were still taking docs for free golfing trips. Nowadays you can’t give anything more than a branded mug (and quite right too.) so a lot of the lobbying has gone up the chain. Which may actually be even worse - you look at how Pfizer got the covid shots throigh, or how WPATH have infiltrated medical transition.

Thats not true. Scientists are a bit wierd, but mostly good people and the community is just boring.

I think it depends which bits you’re looking at. Academics are mainly harmless in the sciences but increasingly woke infiltration is changing that. That rot creeps up from the base.
The people working to find new painkillers in snake venom, or working for gene therapies to prevent paralysing illnesses, they are by and large very good people. It’s the levels above that, that have actual power, where the rot has most impact. The people on the revolving door between the FDA and the pharma company boards. The rather striking number of ex rayth-on people in pharma exec roles (what are they doing there, one might wonder?) The ones lobbying, and the ones selling. Unfortunately they have exponentially more power than Bob whose life’s work has been characterising snake toxins in his lab.

Most people judge "science" by whether it confirms their preconceived notions, whether it's Young Earth Creationists or troon worshipping I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE redditards.

I think we are all guilty of this if we are honest enough. Almost everyone wants their biases confirmed. I’m sure I do too, I try to be aware of it and deliberately challenge myself a lot. Have always had a tendency to but the us v them polarisation has been so striking to me I think about it a lot. I’ve tried to talk to people about this but they don’t want to hear it. Schools don’t make you do devils advocate debating or arguing any more, that might offend people amd that’s probably deliberate too.

 

[AnOminous]

I think we are all guilty of this if we are honest enough. Almost everyone wants their biases confirmed. I’m sure I do too, I try to be aware of it and deliberately challenge myself a lot.

Kuhn pointed this out. Established theories tend to have an inertia to them, where they remain the same until enough anomalous phenomena and exceptions build up to the point that the model is clearly broken, and only then do scientists start seeking for alternative explanations. Ones who do this "prematurely" are often written off as kooks, and sometimes rightly even when they turn out to be right, because at the outset, the originators of a conjecture rarely have positive evidence to support it. For instance, Wegener was widely ridiculed for his theory of continental drift, which turned out true, until there was an actual plausible mechanism (plate tectonics) to explain how this could happen.

This is basically what happened with the amyloid plaque theory, and I think it would have even if that study mentioned earlier hadn't been fabricated. It's really hard to blame anyone (but the fakers I suppose) for buying into this because it looked like a really plausible explanation. Time spent pursuing a reasonable but wrong hypothesis isn't really time wasted if it eliminates it.

From a more cynical view, a new theory can't take hold until the current generation of scientists dies off, although it sometimes does happen that a currently accepted theory collapses nearly immediately under the weight of new evidence.