DISCERN – Distrust in Science Reframed: Understanding and Countering Anti-Scientific Behavior
Is trust in science in decline? Climate change denialism, vaccine hesitancy, and populist politics are prominent contexts where anti-expertise sentiments spread and lead people to take worrisome decisions. But is “distrust in science” a credible global explanation of why people engage in anti-scientific behavior? Recent work in social science and psychology started to challenge this narrative. As such, the phenomenon needs a more nuanced explanation that the worn-out label “distrust in science” cannot provide. This project provides a philosophical contribution to this multi-disciplinary endeavor by pursuing a twofold objective:
- to offer a comprehensive framework of the reasons why people engage in anti-scientific behavior (diagnosis)
- to develop a model for counteracting its detrimental effects (intervention strategies)
The project involves two major parts.
The diagnosis part offers three alternative – albeit mutually compatible – explanations of anti-scientific behavior. According to the misplaced trust explanation, people have not ceased to trust experts but fall prey to pseudo-science and impostors due to their epistemic fragilities and cognitive bias. According to the identity-protective distrust explanation, anti-scientific campaigns are driven by social forces: certain groups reason in a way that strengthens the worldviews constitutive of their social identity or act as if they did believe against science advice to signal their political affiliation. The third explanation accounts for cases of reasonable distrust, where members of marginalized communities have both epistemic and social reasons to reject trustworthy evidence provided by sources that have previously disregarded their interests and needs.
The constructive part (intervention strategies) relies on the proposed explanations to articulate a three-fold therapeutic approach against anti-scientific behavior. The model we put forth combines individual strategies aimed at motivating people to improve their inquiring attitudes, social strategies aimed at countering the risk that people develop forms of identity-protective distrust, and systemic strategies aimed at helping members of marginalized communities overcome reasonable distrust.
This project is theoretical in nature but makes ample use of empirical evidence provided by psychology and social sciences.
DISCERN is a 2-years research project (2024-2025) funded by the European Union and the Italian Ministry of University and Research. It comprises three research units based at the universities of Genoa, Pavia, and Rome III. The Principal Investigator of the project is Michel Croce, based at the University of Genoa.