APS News | Careers and Education

During monthly coffee hours, researchers examine the origins of trust in science

Jackie Acres, who helped design the summer 2024 coffee hours, reflects on the event series and the nature of trust.

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Photo of a woman looking through a microscope.
The Science Trust coffee hours – now “community hours” – are open to scientists, students, and the general public.

For a long time, I took my trust in science for granted. The scientific method made sense: Scientists make observations and test ideas with experiments. Some ideas persist through time, while others are altered or rejected. That never bothered me — that’s the process.

Then in 2020, COVID-19 swept the globe, sparking the largest pandemic in more than a century. Public health experts took the stage. The world held a magnifying glass to the process of science.

For many, COVID-19 tested the limits of trust in science. Consider a hypothetical: You’re a small business owner. When COVID-19 hits, scientists on the news urge people to stay home, and your revenue dries up. The science seems to change frequently. You spot social media posts that voice skepticism of lockdowns.

Suddenly, trusting the science feels a lot harder.

This was a common sentiment for many people, including friends of mine. I empathized with them, and I wanted to understand the roots of scientific mistrust and how people overcome it.

This inspired my involvement in the APS Science Trust Project, an initiative to help scientists understand and counter misinformation. This past summer, I worked with APS to design and facilitate monthly Science Trust coffee hours — now “community hours” — which are open to anyone. We wanted to invite open discussion about how trust develops; how trust is broken, including through misinformation or disinformation; and how we can individually or collectively build trust.

In May, we started with definitions. What do we understand “science” and “trust” to be? What drives trust? Do we trust some science fields or findings more than others, and if so, why? We discussed these questions as a group, sometimes with no easy answer.

A stick figure holds a bowling ball attached with a rope and speaks to three other stick figures, identified as a physicist, biologist, and engineer. The stick figure with the ball says, “If you stand with the bowling ball in front of your face and let go, will you flinch when it swings back?” The physicist answers, “I won’t flinch. I trust conservation of energy.” The biologist says, “I trust my flinch reflex, which was honed by millions of years of evolution to protect my delicate face. I’m not messing with it.” The engineer says, “I don’t trust that you hung that thing up correctly.”
Randall Munroe’s comic “Flinch” takes a light-hearted look at why trust might be difficult even among scientists.
xkcd comics

In June, we learned about the role of empathy in trust. Brian Tibayan, a science communicator and graduate student, spoke about how important empathy is to communicate science, and to understand why and how people’s beliefs and stances develop. Instead of a one-way connection where science is bestowed, empathy encourages a two-way connection wherein science is shared via dialogue.

In July, we focused on Wikipedia, a source many people trust. (APS periodically hosts Wiki Scientist workshops to train scientists to write and edit to Wikipedia pages). We talked with Aaron Halfaker, a senior scientist at Microsoft, on the process of maintaining quality in Wikipedia articles. Currently, all large language models are trained from Wikipedia. However, if Wikipedia editors use LLMs to generate more content, this could introduce inaccurate information, copyright infringement, or libel into Wikipedia articles.

In August, we discussed artificial intelligence. We heard from William Mapp, a CTO at Qlarant; Shane Bergin; a physics professor; and Julian Mintz, a physics graduate student. The variety of perspectives inspired a rich discussion of topics, from AI’s environmental impacts to whether scientists should use AI in their research or classrooms. We, like many others, were concerned about how much AI will change our lives.

I’m grateful for the opportunity I had to shape discussions on science trust, particularly with other people passionate about the topic. One of my personal goals with the project was to encourage attendees to reexamine their own relationships with science and trust — not to break that trust, but to study it through the lens of someone outside science.

Trust in science may not come easily to everyone. But with empathy and communication, I hope we can build that trust and build a better world together.

Learn more about or sign up for the Science Trust community hours.

Jackie Acres

Jackie Acres is a visiting assistant professor of physics and biophysics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

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