Only 15 per cent of Republicans strongly trust scientists, survey finds

Just 15 per cent of Republicans have a strong level of confidence in scientists to act in the best interest of the public, a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center has found.

The Pew Research Center conducted its survey by interview 10,588 adults in the US between September 13 and 18. The survey found that while Americans still generally trust and respect scientists and medical doctors, there are significant divisions in how different groups of people view the scientific community.

One of those divisions, unsurprisingly, is along partisan lines: while just 15 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning individuals have a strong level of confidence in scientists, 41 per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning individuals reported a strong level of confidence.

Interestingly, that number has dipped among both Republican and Democratic voters since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In April of 2020, 27 per cent of Republicans and 52 per cent of Democrats reported having a strong level of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest.

The last two-plus years have been marked by an unusual level of scrutiny of public health officials as the Republican politicians and the American public increasingly chafed against measures taken to attempt to limit the spread of Covid.

Leaders in the Republican Party, like former President Donald Trump, eschewed public health guidelines in 2020 and worked to sow doubt about the effectiveness of Covid vaccines and masks and the necessity of other public health precautions.

Still, though the polling found that a small share of Republicans have a strong level of confidence in scientists to act in the public interest, a majority of Republicans have at least a fair amount of confidence. 63 per cent of Republican respondents said they had at least a fair amount of confidence in scientists, compared to 89 per cent of Democrats.

There are other ways to break down which Americans tend to trust scientists more and less. College graduates, for instance, were more likely to express a high level of trust in scientists than Americans who did not obtain a college degree.

36 per cent of respondents with a college degree said that they have a high level of trust in scientists, while just 24 per cent of those who have completed some college or less felt the same. Those numbers diverge greatly, however, when also sorted by party affiliation: 53 per cent of Democratic college graduates have a high level of confidence in scientists, while the same is true for just 15 percent of Republican college graduates.

“This data is in line with the idea that party affiliation offers a strong anchor point for people’s views and, in some cases, can outweigh the tendency for those with higher education to express more support for and trust in scientists,” the Pew Research Center wrote in its summary of the results.

The survey also found that white Americans tend to have more confidence in scientists than Black and Hispanic Americans, with past history perhaps playing some role in the discrepancy.