Coronavirus is linked to 5G cell phone network towers. The COVID-19 vaccine delivers a microchip into your body to track your movements. Manmade climate change is a hoax.
These conspiracy theories and misinformation have been floating around the Internet for the past several years, perpetuated by a growing breed: Science skeptics. Peddling disinformation that is untrue at best and deadly at worst, people who embrace pseudoscience or who disdain academic or clinical science are contributing to a science legitimacy crisis.
What is a legitimacy crisis? Gordon Gauchat is glad you asked.
Gauchat is an associate professor of sociology at UWM. His latest paper, published in July in the Annual Review of Sociology, explores the legitimacy of science – what it is, why it’s eroding, and the consequences if we let it happen.
Gauchat sat down to talk about his research and why we should all give science its due.
What made you decide to write about the legitimacy of science?
I was invited to write this paper around the time that the pandemic broke out, and it became increasingly important as the pandemic rolled on. What happened with COVID, the misinformation, the death threats to Anthony Fauci – it was disturbing to me. I’ve had this confidence for most of my life that we could be reasonable and rational human beings, and seeing that unravel was the primary motivation for this work.
I think the biggest question to ask is, what exactly do you mean by a “legitimacy crisis?”
A legitimacy crisis is when a variety of different populations, but in particular, the public, has lost trust in some type of authority. That could be the legal system, a political figure, or, in this case, science.
Now the thing that you’re encouraged to ask is, what do you mean by science?
I am encouraged to ask that, yes.
We have heard a lot about a crisis of knowledge and truth, but related are issues around how we evaluate evidence.
I trace this seemingly trivial question of “what science is” back to the origins of social science in the United States. In the early post-World War II period, Robert Merton addressed science as a social system, or a complex organization. Equally important is the question, why is it legitimate? Why should we trust the knowledge produced by this system?
His first answer is that science is an organized, professional activity that takes place in specific spaces, like the research university. Yet, science is sheltered within our world and broader culture.
The culture of science involves a set of ethics and standards, values that are shared among scientists – or at least, are going to pattern people’s behavior. Not everyone is going to adhere to these, because we have scientific fraud. But the idea that we can identify fraud, or the quality of scientific work, means that we must have shared understandings about what’s good, how we measure quality, and what is credible evidence. This ethos of science provides the basic rules we use to evaluate and accumulate knowledge.
What is the evidence that there is a legitimacy crisis?
We have been able to track, in public opinion polling, a loosening of belief in things that scientists say about major issues of the day, particularly climate change and around public health. There is a proliferation of conspiracy theories that conflict with mainstream scientific knowledge, indicating that people are looking elsewhere for answers.
Thus, we might say that there has been a decline in the belief that scientists promote the best knowledge we have today.
At the same time, you have all of these challenges to scientific authority in the courts and in the government. There are major cases recently decided or currently before the Supreme Court that are trying to limit the power of government agencies and their reliance on scientific expertise.
How do government agencies play into this?
(There is) something called the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946. It establishes what people now call the “administrative state.” Think entities like OSHA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Center for Disease Control.
What Congress realized in the 1940s was, in a very complex world, it couldn’t possibly regulate all aspects of the world anymore. Industrialization and mass communication had changed the game. What they wanted to do was shift power to agencies, allowing them to make regulatory rulings. That meant that the regulations being written, or executed, are no longer a result of democratic deliberation by elected officials.
So, what “legtimate” authority replaced the “democratic”? The agencies and administrators were to rely on scientific expertise, “the best knowledge of the day.” The Administrative Procedures Act basically says to government agencies, you have authority based on the best knowledge available, because elected officials cannot be experts on everything. They need to cede power to administrators who can specialize in water quality, air quality, chemical risks, public health, public infrastructure, etc. This created a complicated and deep connection between scientific research and the modern state, but much of the detail of this relationship was left to agencies with congressional oversight.
This connection between science and the regulatory state is the most profound aspect of the legitimacy crisis. We had a recent ruling by the Supreme Court limiting the authority of the EPA, and another to limit the CDC’s control in the wake of the pandemic. The mifepristone ruling in Texas challenges the authority of the FDA to define “sufficient scientific evidence for drug safety.” What is most disturbing about this moment is not just the level of distrust, but that it is polarized. Political parties and political identities are deeply divided in their trust in science and the regulatory state.
In the paper’s abstract, you mentioned that there are “internal” reasons for science’s legitimacy crisis. What are those reasons?
The article doesn’t get into those, but I can mention a few. In general, scientists are prone to the influence of broader culture and technological change. In an information-saturated, distracted world, you have incentives to sensationalize your research, and search for some finding that grabs attention, regardless of its fidelity to the truth.
Another connected issue is how competitive the field of scientific research is and how much funding goes into it. It is very difficult to be a researcher or scientist or find positions in a research university. Some people are going to start to do things that are unethical to “make it”. We’ve seen that with fraud, people stretching their data, or taking certain positions because it fits with a prevailing ideology.
Why does it matter that there is a science legitimacy crisis? What’s the harm in people being skeptical of science and facts?
Humanity’s strength (and ironically our weakness) is the capacity for us to define a problem and coordinate about how to solve it. Well, that involves discovering what’s true. I don’t even mean in just a rigid scientific sense; it often involves reasoning about what’s right and wrong, too. Why value the health of poor people, for example. Those are things that we do have to explain to segments of the population, no matter how abhorrent it might be that they don’t understand it or how much we take it for granted. Science, reasoning, civility, and thinking are still the best tools we have, imperfect though they are, for achieving the ends we know are true and right.
The two major crises I mentioned are COVID vaccinations and climate change. Well, in neither of those instances does individual activity make a dent in the problem. If I start walking and sell my car, I’m not going to solve, to anyone’s satisfaction, the climate crisis. There are a series of things like that that are public problems. That’s also the role of a knowledge system, to tell people what the priorities are by telling them what is true to the “best of our knowledge.”
Leave us with some hope: How do we turn things around?
Human knowledge and thinking remain the most important tools in our toolbox for making the world better. We need to improve how we communicate that hopeful aspect of science and the actual practice of what it is. The mythic is not false; it is the hope we find in the manifold possibilities before us.
But, the practice of science is mundane. It can’t be something that happens in 5 minutes on Morning Joe. It must be incorporated into the K-12 curriculum starting as early as possible: The habits and ethics of producing unbiased (knowledge), objectivity, reasonability, and how to have disagreements without oppositions and enemies. Going back to basic thinking, not just processing a glut of information, is the best course of action.
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science