America's fractured trust in science, explained in 3 charts

Every year since 2019, Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank and polling organization, has asked nearly 10,000 American adults how they feel about science.

In 2019, the vast majority of people surveyed across the political spectrum were confident that scientists act in the public’s best interest. In fact, Americans placed more confidence in scientists than nearly anyone else, including elected officials, journalists, business leaders, and even schoolteachers.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic happened. Democrats doubled down in their confidence while Republicans lost theirs. During the height of the pandemic, this partisan divide in science skepticism manifested as culture wars between those who wore masks and lined up for vaccines, and those who did not.

The public’s trust — or lack thereof — in science shapes political decisions around climate change, research funding, and food and drug regulation. As Donald Trump prepares to take office again, the scientific community is grappling with what his agenda means for them. Scientists worry that a second Trump term will stall efforts to fight climate change and eviscerate federal agencies involved in public health.

According to Pew’s latest survey, Republican confidence in science went up this year, the first increase in trust reported since before the pandemic. But the incoming Trump administration, now prominently featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is placing science skepticism at the heart of promises to “Make America Healthy Again.”

The belief that health care practitioners, federal agencies, and institutions of science are colluding against us is being pushed by rising GOP leaders like conservative health influencers Calley and Casey Means to stoke conservative anxieties. According to Pew, nearly two-thirds of conservatives believe that scientists should stay out of science-related policy debates. Now that Trump has selected Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), those conservatives may get their wish.

Here are three charts that make sense of America’s relationship with science today, and highlight how scientists can earn the public’s trust back.

Covid-19 caught the world with its pants down, and public trust in science never fully recovered. As the virus spread, the imperfect process of science was laid out for everyone to see.

Normally, publishing a biomedical science paper is a years-long process. The experiments themselves can take many weeks or months, depending on the nature of the project. Once data is analyzed, written up, and submitted to a journal for peer review, it can take anywhere from a few months to a few years to get published — reviewers often ask scientists to make changes or include more information, to make sure their findings are as airtight as possible.

But in the early stages of the pandemic, people were desperate for answers — and scientists stepped into the vacuum to publish rushed, sometimes error-filled papers without peer review. Journalists published news articles about those pre-print studies without effectively communicating their uncertainty. Policymakers were left to make huge decisions based on limited, inconclusive, and sometimes downright fraudulent data.

But science is a messy, nonlinear process, and new data can overturn previously held truths at any moment. The scientific method involves making an educated guess about how the world works, finding a way to test that guess, and seeing what happens — basically, science is the act of messing around and finding out.

In most cases, it takes many iterations of this process before the scientific community reaches a consensus (and even then, new experiments can shatter what was once accepted as fact). For scientists, this is a given. “The consistency is only to the data, not your position,” said Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The problem, he said, is that politics don’t work that way. “In politics, you should be consistent about your position,” Parikh said. And when you’re not consistent, as Vice President Kamala Harris discovered during the 2024 campaign, voters can punish you for it.

So when the government seemed to flip-flop during the pandemic — like telling people to only wear cloth masks to preserve limited supplies for front line health care workers, only to later say that cloth masks aren’t very effective — most people didn’t instinctively think it was all part of the learning process. They felt betrayed. And that sense of betrayal ultimately extended to vaccines.

The public lost trust in science for years following the pandemic. According to Pew, though Democrats’ confidence fell by a few percentage points between 2019 and 2023, they still overwhelmingly trusted scientists throughout the pandemic. Republicans’ trust, however, plummeted between 2020 and 2021, and it’s only just beginning to recover. The massive partisan divide is striking: When surveyed in October, 88 percent of Democrats said they have “a fair amount” or “a great deal” of confidence in scientists, compared to 66 percent of Republicans.

When asked, about 9 in 10 people, regardless of party affiliation, agreed that research scientists are “intelligent.” Alec Tyson, an associate director of research at Pew, pointed out that in general, scientists “engender high levels of trust from the public in a low-trust era,” inspiring more votes of confidence than people are willing to give just about any other occupation.

However, while over three-quarters of Democrats believe scientists are also “honest” and “focus on solving real-world problems,” only about half of Republicans agree. On the flip side, many more Republicans than Democrats agree that scientists are cold, closed-minded, ignore moral values of society, and feel superior to others.

The majority of Americans surveyed also think scientists are socially awkward and bad at communicating.

“Look, scientists are human,” Parikh said. “We have the whole spectrum of the population. Every personality type that’s out in the real world is in the scientific laboratory as well.” So, sure — some scientists are certainly socially awkward (and as a former scientist, I’ve both witnessed and likely contributed to this stereotype). And unfortunately, scientists rarely learn how to write for non-academic audiences or speak with the press as part of their training.

There are some easy steps scientists can take to improve their overall vibe. A group of scientists, including Samantha Yammine and Daniel Toker (@ScienceSam and @the_brain_scientist on both Instagram and TikTok), ran an experiment in 2019 to see whether posting selfies on social media could change people’s perception of scientists. When scientists posted friendly-looking pictures of themselves against a science-y backdrop, like their lab bench, viewers rated them as significantly warmer than if they had posted a picture of their lab equipment alone.

Parikh thinks that building long-term relationships between researchers, policymakers, reporters, and their community — whether through social media, fellowship programs, or citizen science — can strengthen trust over time. “Science is a human endeavor,” Parikh said. “The way you build trust is by being open and honest about both the strengths and the limitations of your process.”

Pew’s survey asked respondents another big question: “If you trust scientists,” Tyson said, “what role do you want them to play in public life?”

According to the National Science Foundation, the federal government in 2020 employed about 175,000 scientists, the vast majority of whom conduct research for the Department of Defense. Though elected officials hold final authority, scientists can influence policy decisions by advising politicians, and may work for the federal government, or nongovernmental organizations like universities or think tanks. In times of crisis, like the Covid-19 pandemic, scientists in government have the power to sway decisions that affect everyone.

People were divided: About half of US adults think scientists should take an active role in science-related policy debates, while the other half thinks scientists should just stick to science. Again, there was a big partisan gap, with many more Republicans wanting scientists to stay out of policy debates.

One possible explanation, Parikh said, is that people are worried that scientists are so married to their data, they ignore everything else. During the 2020 lockdowns, for example, many people disagreed with school closures — though closing schools was a largely evidence-based decision, that evidence was limited and uncertain, and closures ultimately caused real, lasting damage to children’s education and mental health. In policy debates like that, where scientific evidence is pitted against economic reality, family values, and individual emotions, some people may worry that scientists would only consider the science.

That’s not to say that science and data matter when it comes to policymaking — nearly all hot-button issues today, like reproductive care, climate change, and drug regulation, have science at their core. But science and data are “not the only part of the equation,” Parikh said. “That’s why we have policymakers. We have to have a discussion about what the data means.”

Tyson’s team has an eye on the Trump administration’s health proposals, and what they might mean for the public’s perception of science. While it’s too early to know exactly what role he will play, Kennedy has long held outright conspiratorial beliefs around vaccines, fluoride, seed oils, and pesticides, and has said he would dramatically restructure HHS, the federal organization responsible for public health.

“I think we’ll be ready, a year from now, to take stock of the change in administration and see where the conversation goes from there,” Tyson said.

For years, science communicators believed that the gap between scientists and the rest of the population could be explained by inadequate information. This paradigm, called the “deficit model,” states that if only the public were more educated about the scientific method, they would be more willing to trust scientific expertise. In this model, scientists hold crucial information that non-scientists don’t have, and sharing that information should be enough to sway hearts and minds.

While that theory makes some intuitive sense, it doesn’t seem to be how humans actually work. Pew reported that, among politically aligned voters, whether someone went to college didn’t change their trust in science. It’s not about education — it’s about transparency, relationship-building, and a willingness to acknowledge when science makes mistakes. If the deficit model were an experiment, the data would suggest it’s not working.

While I don’t believe that science is — or should be — apolitical, it ought to be bipartisan. “It’s a process for thinking,” Parikh said, “and that process for thinking is not partisan.” Parikh is cautiously optimistic that this year’s upswing in Republican confidence in science marks the beginning of the end of science’s post-pandemic slump.

“If we can do five point increases for three years in a row on the Republican side, we’re right back at complete bipartisanship,” Parikh said.