Don't Tell Me What I Don't Want to Hear! Politicization and Ideological Conflict Explain Why Citizens Have Lower Trust in Climate Scientists and Economists Than in Other Natural Scientists

Abstract

Studies suggest that citizens have higher trust in some groups of scientists than in others. However, we still know little about the causes of these trust gaps. The current study fills this knowledge gap by examining Norwegian citizens' trust in climate scientists, economists, and so‐called “less politicized natural scientists.” I argue that trust in climate scientists and economists is lower than trust in less politicized natural scientists because the former fields are politicized, while the latter are not. Politicization strengthens ideological conflicts between citizens' ideology and research produced by climate scientists and economists, which leads to lower trust in these groups of scientists. I test this argument by running regression analyses on data from a representative survey of the Norwegian population. The results support the argument: Citizens have significantly higher trust in less politicized natural scientists than in both climate scientists and economists, and these differences can be explained by ideological biases in trust. Citizens with a proeconomic growth ideology have significantly lower trust in climate scientists than in less politicized natural scientists, and citizens with a left‐wing economic ideology have significantly lower trust in economists than in less politicized natural scientists.

Ideological predictors of anti-science attitudes: exploring the impact of group-based dominance and populism in North America and Western Europe

“…Populist attitudes share common elements with beliefs in conspiracy theories, such as the perceived secretive coordination among actors and skepticism toward social institutions (Rydgren, 2017;Douglas and Sutton, 2023). In line with this, several studies show that populist attitudes correlate with belief in conspiracy theories (Castanho Silva et al, 2017;Eberl et al, 2021;Erisen et al, 2021;Marcos-Marne et al, 2022).…”

“…Although there is a growing body of scholarly work on populism (Hunger and Paxton, 2022), there remains a paucity of empirical research exploring the association between populist ideology and anti-science attitudes (Giorgi and Eslen-Ziya, 2022). However, some scholars have suggested a link between populist worldviews and anti-science attitudes (e.g., Mede and Schäfer, 2020;Jylhä et al, 2022), rooted in populism's opposition to elites and mistrust of not only social institutions (Rydgren, 2017) but also scientists and experts (Merkley, 2020). Studies have demonstrated that this skepticism can lead to questioning wellestablished science, such as anthropogenic climate change (Huber, 2020;Huber et al, 2022).…”