Americans trust scientists. This may seem, to some, like surprising news, given the extent to which attitudes towards science were politicized during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the data bear it out—the scientific community has long enjoyed public trust. Data show that 44 percent of U.S. adults say they have a great deal of confidence in the scientific community. This trust has remained fairly stable for decades.
Underlying this trust is likely the assumption that science will do what it has historically done ever since it developed its core methodologies—pursue truth through empirical means, guided by data rather than by other incentives, be they financial or partisan. It is then worth asking—do we, in the scientific community, do this? On one level, the answer is obviously yes, we do, though perhaps imperfectly. But what if we modify the question, to ask: do we do this all the time, or at least enough to fully justify the public’s trust in us? How often do we think for ourselves, guided principally by data, and how often are our thoughts shaped by other factors? I would argue that we are susceptible to other factors, though not necessarily in the sense of being unduly partisan or subject to financial incentives. Instead, science, it seems to me, has a weakness for groupthink, for being swayed by the consensus simply because it is the consensus. If this is so, then we have a responsibility not just to be on guard against this tendency, but also to maintain a healthy level of iconoclasm, an instinct for pushing against the consensus as a means of testing our assumptions and ensuring that we are indeed thinking for ourselves.
The integrity of the scientific discipline is a key inheritance of the Enlightenment, a period which did much to support an empirical approach to problems. Such integrity, then, is kin to the principles of small-l liberalism which also emerged from the period, and which are based, in part, on empirical observations about society and human nature. Keeping science “honest”—rooted in empiricism, and as free as possible from groupthink—is therefore core to supporting the liberalism that informs a healthier world.
Read the full post on The Healthiest Goldfish.