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I’ll be honest, everyone, I’ve really struggled with how to introduce today’s topic. I like to open these videos with a good framing for what I’m about to talk about, to give you some context or some idea of how I’m approaching a particular subject. But what I want to talk about today is so baffling, so unlike every other recent video, that I think I just need to come out and say it: researchers have just discovered GOOD NEWS about the US public’s understanding of science. I know, I’m just as confused as you.
But wait, it actually gets even more bonkers: this new study has found that throughout Donald Trump’s four years as President of the United States, the American public’s trust in scientists INCREASED.
I don’t even know what to do with this. Did…did Donald Trump make things better somehow? Like how that random mugger killed Thomas and Martha Wayne and ended up creating Batman?
Okay, spoiler alert but no, probably not. Donald Trump was and still is nothing but a horrific blight upon our entire planet.
AND YET the news is still good. The new study is titled “Citizen attitudes toward science and technology, 1957–2020: measurement, stability, and the Trump challenge.” And yes, there is data going back to 1957, though that’s mostly there to illustrate the relative stability of Americans’ perceptions about science and scientists over the past six decades. The real meat of the study involves newer data surveying people in 2016 and then again in 2020 to see whether or not they were affected by Trump’s continuous attacks on science.
In case you missed it, or you gave yourself a lobotomy in order to forget it because in my last video you learned that ignorance is bliss, let me remind you that Trump spent his entire presidency engaging in an all-out war on science. Researchers even created a handy tracking method to document his activities, finding that “During President Trump’s time in office (including the transition period), there were 154 documented instances of federal government censorship of scientists, and 19 instances of scientists engaging in self-censorship.” They also found he dismantled scientific agencies, lost 672 scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency, limited the public’s access to research conducted by government agencies, slashed research funding, and destroyed existing scientific records.
And then the pandemic started!
That opened up a new avenue of science denial for Trump, allowing him to not just spread misinformation about climate change or whatever, but to also tell people to inject themselves with bleach and take horse dewormer rather than just, you know, not go to the movies without a mask on. Trump’s attacks on his own advisor at the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Anthony Fauci, are now the stuff of legend. He called the extremely competent and well-educated infectious disease expert an idiot and a disaster who would have killed half a million Americans if he were in charge.
Basically, scientists haven’t had this bad of a time under a president since Millard Fillmore told the press that people should drink mercury to cure melancholia, something that didn’t actually happen, I made it up because Trump is so much worse for science than any president previously.
Trump, of course, leads an entire cult of semi-literate bigots who echo everything he says, so it’s not shocking that 2020 was a year of hearing a lot of very loud, very wrong opinions about science. Social media was awash in it, and unfortunately many of us had at least one family member who was confidently shouting these opinions at us in real life.
It certainly seemed like our society was stupider than ever. But it’s important to remember that social media experiences and real-life anecdotes don’t necessarily reflect reality. Thus, we have, well, science to figure out what’s true and what’s not.
Surveying people’s opinions is a very, very tricky science, in that asking the same question in different ways can get you wildly different results. For instance, most people who aren’t scientists tend to not really care much about science, in general, so if you ask them how they feel about science, or about scientists, you tend to get a kind of wishy washy answer. But these political scientists from University of Michigan decided to gauge people’s opinions by asking them about specific topics, like “How often in the past year have you gone searching for information about climate change,” and “what did you find when you did,” and “how much did you trust that information?”
And what they found was that in 2016, most people were, well, wishy washy. They were on the fence. But by 2020, there was a dramatic shift, in which people were actively seeking out information about these topics that were suddenly very important to them, like climate change and COVID-19. And once they were actively doing that, they were developing stronger feelings of trust in scientists and in the science they were doing.
Yes, there were also people who fell off the fence to the other side, who increased their negative feelings towards scientists. But overall, the increase in positive feelings more than made up for the negative and so we ended up with an overall increase in public trust in scientists. Even Republicans ended up more likely to trust scientists. Trump was successful in his attempts to polarize public opinion on science, but when the dust cleared, there were more people on our side than on his.
That’s fantastic, but let’s not be too quick to give credit to Trump: this likely happened because the stakes were high. People were forced to do their research and kind of come to their own conclusions about things, which, yes, got them actively involved in learning about the science, but also lead to a lot of dead people who “did their own research” and decided COVID-19 was a liberal hoax.
It’s possible that those twin existential threats of climate change and a global pandemic could stimulate that interest in science all on their own, and it’s further possible that sensible leadership could have celebrated the scientists who were working hard to keep people safe, and increased that public trust even more. Luckily, we have a very good example of that: New Zealand handled the pandemic very well, comparatively speaking, with quick decisive action and a positive relationship between the government and public health experts. Gallup surveys showed that trust in science SOARED in New Zealand compared to other countries around the world.
So the real story here isn’t that Trump’s attack on science helped inspire an opposing boost in trust; it’s more that scientists and their work became so important and so obviously good that even the most powerful man in the world couldn’t convince most people to hate them.
Unfortunately I do have to end with some bad news: in the years since Trump left office, Pew Research surveys have shown a steady decline in public trust in science, especially amongst Republicans and the religious. Those surveys aren’t as detailed as University of Michigan study, so it may be that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Still, it’s worth thinking about how we might go about improving things, even without starting another pandemic. Or just letting the one we’re still in rev back up to a level where the average person notices it’s still happening. If we can keep Donald Trump from regaining the US presidency, maybe – maybe! – we can get an administration that builds upon the success of the Inflation Reduction Act to pass a Green New Deal, actually following the recommendations of scientists who are trying to save all of humanity. That would be nice.
