Trust in science is low among minorities for a reason
African Americans, women, rural dwellers and less-educated people are more likely to distrust scientists. They’re also less likely to be scientists. That’s not a coincidence, new research found.
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a nationwide conversation in the U.S. about how much people trust scientists and trained medical professionals. But for some communities, distrust has been the norm.
For at least 50 years, underrepresented groups in the U.S., including African Americans and women, have been less likely to trust scientists, according to David Lazer, a distinguished professor of political science and computer science at Northeastern University. That demographic chasm in trust can potentially turn deadly if it means people are less likely to turn to trusted sources of information, which is why Lazer wanted to get to the bottom of it.
“We have these systematic gaps, and that has consequences because, on general principle, there are benefits to trusting scientific institutions,” Lazer said. “Sometimes we’ve been led astray, but generally there are benefits. Getting vaccinated is good, and that has a whole set of downstream benefits.”
In a new paper, Lazer reports one potential explanation for why this trust gap exists: diversity, or, more accurately, lack of diversity.
Lazer and his collaborators asked their survey respondents whether they would trust the advice of scientists who are similar to them in various ways, from race and gender to education and religiosity. They found that people in these underrepresented groups were more likely to trust someone who was similar to them.
“If you’re a woman and it’s a female scientist, that engenders more trust for a woman, but it doesn’t affect, one way or the other, men,” Lazer said.
The problem is that there are very few scientists from these demographic groups.
Groups that are more likely to distrust scientific institutions include African Americans, women, those who live in rural areas and those with lower socio-economic status, which is tied to less income but also less education, according to the General Social Survey. All of those groups are also significantly underrepresented in scientific fields.
The U.S. is 50% male, 59% white and 80% from non-rural areas, while the U.S. workforce is about 66%, 65% and 92% in those same categories, according to the 2020 census. However, a report from the National Science Board found that while 24% of U.S. workers were in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, only about 18% of female workers held a STEM job, compared to 30% of male workers. Black and Hispanic workers made up 8% and 15% of STEM jobs, respectively, while white workers comprised 63% of the STEM workforce.
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It doesn’t help that for certain underrepresented groups, their distrust in scientific research is “well motivated,” Lazer said.
Conducted by the United States Public Health Service, the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study ran from 1932 to 1972 with the intent of observing the effects of syphilis. Almost 400 Black men with syphilis took part in the study. They never received treatment, even after penicillin became widely available, resulting in the deaths of at least 28 and as many as 100 men.
However, the extent to which certain groups trust scientific institutions and knowledge can have significant consequences, best evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, Lazer explained.
“We could see that individuals who were less trusting were less likely to be vaccinated,” Lazer said. “You put those pieces of the puzzle together, it strongly suggests that trust led to decisions that for high-trust people, lowered their probability of mortality and for lower-trust people, increased their chances of mortality.”
The disparity between the often invaluable work being done by scientists and who actually gets to do it breeds a sense that science has a certain social remove from how people live their lives, Lazer and his collaborators found.
“If we can help reduce those social distances, that would have positive effects on trust and probably trustworthiness,” Lazer said. “I actually think a science that is better connected to society will be a better science because it will have the broader set of interests at heart.”
