State of science
Issue 106 - 5 July 2022 (8-min read)
In an increasingly polarised world where people with differing opinions seem to operate on completely different planes of reality, it may come as a surprise to you too, as it did to me, that a lot more people trust science now than before.
This week, The Global Tiller looks at the 2022 findings of the 3M-sponsored State of Science Index Survey and compare how trust in science compares across different parts of the world. What are some issues that respondents believe should be prioritised and can we really trust corporations that have caused so much mistrust to begin with?
The State of Science Index is a third-party, independent research study commissioned by 3M that tracks and explores global attitudes toward science, taking the pulse on how people think and feel about the field and its impact on the world around us. The first survey was conducted in 2018, which acts as the baseline for subsequent years. This year’s survey included 1,000 respondents in each of these 17 countries: US, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, UAE, India, China, Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Australia.
Their recent findings reveal that people recognise the relevancy of science to their lives. As compared to pre-pandemic 2020 when 46% of the respondents said that science is important to their lives, trust in science increased to 52% in 2022. This trust is also especially strong among the younger generation with 61% of Gen Z and millennials agreeing that science is very important to their everyday lives as compared to 53% of Gen X and Boomers.
Among the countries surveyed, France has the lowest percentage (77%) of respondents who say that science is important to their everyday lives compared to 97% in South Korea.
Around the world, people are connecting the dots to how science can solve issues that resonate in their lives, according to the survey. Besides the Covid-19 pandemic, the top issues people want science to solve are climate change and equal access to quality healthcare. Around 87% of the respondents agreed that, in the future, the world will be more dependent on scientific knowledge than ever before.
Each country also had a unique response to what their country’s priority should be. Canadians and the Polish rank improving access to quality healthcare as a top action for their country while Americans believe that mental health is a more urgent healthcare priority for science than vaccines. The Chinese want their government to focus on improving air quality while the Germans, the South Koreans and the Italians want their government to prioritise climate change.
The survey also included interesting perspectives on what the role of science should be in the future. It showed that 78% of people believe ensuring access to quality healthcare regardless of age, gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, location, etc. is the top social justice advancement society should prioritise in the next five years, and roughly two-thirds of the world believes AI is an exciting technology that impacts their life daily. A common concern shared by respondents across the world was the lack of diversity in STEM fields, both in terms of gender and race/ethnicity, and the risk to the credibility of science posed by widespread misinformation.
Perhaps it is because this survey brings some rare positive news but I embraced its findings as a sign that the majority of the world is committed to bringing positive change in the world — that those who are curtailing bodily freedoms and human rights may be louder but they are not in the majority.
But then I read about how 3M hid extraordinary levels of toxins in the water, soil and people near its factory in Belgium where residents have discovered PFOS (known as the forever chemical) in their bloods at levels more commonly seen within waste water. 3M insisted that this level of PFOS does not cause harm to human health, undermining the very credibility of scientific studies that its State of Science Index aims to bolster.
So while I take hope from the fact that people are placing their trust in science, I also hope that the next 3M survey questions the level of trust people have in giant corporations. I assume it’s not high.
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
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Dig Deeper
Do doctors really know what they are talking about when they tell us vaccines are safe? Should we take climate experts at their word when they warn us about the perils of global warming? Why should we trust science when our own politicians don’t? In this landmark book, Naomi Oreskes offers a bold and compelling defense of science, revealing why the social character of scientific knowledge is its greatest strength—and the greatest reason we can trust it.
…and now what?
It wasn’t more than a year ago when we were discovering, much to our surprise, just how strongly opposed people were to the Covid-19 vaccines. Fuelled by weird QAnon theories, the (not-so) wellbeing influencers, other similar gurus, even people in our close surroundings were suddenly convinced that the governments were trying to inject nano bots in our veins or that Bill Gates was planning world domination by putting needles in our arms.
It was a surprise to many (myself included) to see such a rebuke of medicine and of science in general. It led to divisions within family, among friends and communities. And governments found themselves unprepared to fight this new situation. “Trust the science” they kept repeating desperately since it seemed no one did anymore. Or did they?
Very often I found myself trying to reconcile some contradictory situations: people I knew, whom I assumed were trustful in science, were sharing some questionable “alternative facts”. Yet, those very people were also the first ones to share information from the latest IPCC report on climate change. So they were trusting the science for climate change, just not for Covid.
Why? It hit me while working on today’s newsletter when I read the end of Hira’s piece. As it turns out, “science” is very often quite a big word (not unlike other Bigs like Pharma, Tech and so on). A word that has lost some of its meaning. What was this science that governments were asking us to trust — one that is too often asked to speak only when it pleases those in power? What was this science companies were trying to promote — one that is used to pollute and disrupt our chemistry? What was this science philosophers, pundits and others were trying to defend — one that managed at one point in history to justify the inferiority of some people over others?Science is way too often used to provide a sense of legitimacy, of rationality more than being actual science.
Even in school, I remember attending science classes during which I was just told to believe what I was told through basic experiences that didn’t always work.
But science, while somehow being all this, is also everything but this.
First and foremost, science is a way to think, a way to face our beliefs with trial and errors, a way to confront our convictions to the harsh reality of experience. Science is this ability humans have to draw procedures, theories, concrete technical applications from their deep thinking, from their innate curiosity to go beyond the obvious and to dig deeper.
In that way, science is universal and exists in every culture, every civilisation. In some cultures, it led to the relativity theory, in others it led to accurate navigating system using the stars, the winds and the waves to journey through vast oceans.
So what should we do to avoid science being used improperly, to be used as an argument or a justification to nefarious ends?
Perhaps, a good strategy would be to avoid saying “science says”. It is more accurate to say “as for know, considering the state of knowledge, the scientific community agrees on the fact/theory that…” It’s longer but it reflects more accurately what science exactly says. That’s one lesson I took from Naomi Oreskes’ book recommended above.
It’s unfruitful to oppose science with “culture”, “traditional knowledge” or even “indigenous knowledge”. All those are forms of science too. As someone suggested to me recently, we should instead talk about “European science”, “Polynesian science”, “Indian science” and so on.
Science is the ability to understand the complex, the non-obvious, to go beyond biases and beliefs. So the least we could do for it would be to integrate its complexity, to not fall into the easy and the obvious and to go beyond our own biases when we defend it. And perhaps this would keep people from resorting to absurd beliefs when they are actually just protesting the injustices of the world.
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury