The article is paywalled but the research group has a 2021 arxiv publication on the same topic: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing: excess confidence explains negative attitudes towards science"
It's a survey-based study but the obvious thing to consider is, what do they mean by 'negative attitudes towards science'? Are they talking about the scientific process itself, i.e. experiment and observation coupled to theoretical modeling as the basis of discovering how our universe functions? Or are they talking about negative attitudes towards the 'science-based' pronouncements of governmental and academic institutions?
Certainly the modern scientific process takes place at such a level of specialization that even working scientists in one field are usually unable to judge the quality of results obtained in another field without doing a lot of time-consuming research, but if a long record of failure of peer review exists (and it does) then it shouldn't be surprising when people lose faith in academic and governmental institutions - but I'd guess they still believe that the scientific process itself is valid, it's just that the received wisdom of the white-robed annoited priesthood is no longer taken at face value.
There are many reasons for this - e.g. while science may have been viewed by all as wonderful in the 1950s, many discoveries (environmental carcinogens, fossil fueled global warming, etc.) have upset major economic and institutional powers leading to coordinated attacks on the reliability of science in major media outlets. Then there's the long record of pharmaceutical skullduggery (the push to prescribe opiates for just about any condition, leading to an addiction epidemic, the failure of a wide variety of science-approved medications to live up to claims and/or the production of negative side effects (Vioxx etc.)) - and as far as the vaccine controversy, yes it was a terrible idea to put organometallic preservatives in multi-use bottles of vaccines, and yes it was done to cut costs, but the claim it led to an epidemic of autism isn't well-supported, there are many more plausible industrial sources of heavy metals to blame for high childhood exposures, but that's not as convenient for class-action lawsuits due to vaccination records, etc.
This doesn't mean that most science isn't fairly reliable, but the glaring failures are what make the headlines, and there have been quite a few of them.
If we really want to regain public trust in academic institutions, divorce proceedings aimed at kicking the corporate interests out of the academic sphere will have to be initiated, meaning for example no more exclusive private rights to NIH-financed inventions and no more revolving doors between academic institutions and pharmaceutical executive boards. Don't hold your breath, we live in an era of systematic insitutional corruption that Trofim Lysenko would have fit right into.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.11193.pdf
It's a survey-based study but the obvious thing to consider is, what do they mean by 'negative attitudes towards science'? Are they talking about the scientific process itself, i.e. experiment and observation coupled to theoretical modeling as the basis of discovering how our universe functions? Or are they talking about negative attitudes towards the 'science-based' pronouncements of governmental and academic institutions?
Certainly the modern scientific process takes place at such a level of specialization that even working scientists in one field are usually unable to judge the quality of results obtained in another field without doing a lot of time-consuming research, but if a long record of failure of peer review exists (and it does) then it shouldn't be surprising when people lose faith in academic and governmental institutions - but I'd guess they still believe that the scientific process itself is valid, it's just that the received wisdom of the white-robed annoited priesthood is no longer taken at face value.
There are many reasons for this - e.g. while science may have been viewed by all as wonderful in the 1950s, many discoveries (environmental carcinogens, fossil fueled global warming, etc.) have upset major economic and institutional powers leading to coordinated attacks on the reliability of science in major media outlets. Then there's the long record of pharmaceutical skullduggery (the push to prescribe opiates for just about any condition, leading to an addiction epidemic, the failure of a wide variety of science-approved medications to live up to claims and/or the production of negative side effects (Vioxx etc.)) - and as far as the vaccine controversy, yes it was a terrible idea to put organometallic preservatives in multi-use bottles of vaccines, and yes it was done to cut costs, but the claim it led to an epidemic of autism isn't well-supported, there are many more plausible industrial sources of heavy metals to blame for high childhood exposures, but that's not as convenient for class-action lawsuits due to vaccination records, etc.
This doesn't mean that most science isn't fairly reliable, but the glaring failures are what make the headlines, and there have been quite a few of them.
If we really want to regain public trust in academic institutions, divorce proceedings aimed at kicking the corporate interests out of the academic sphere will have to be initiated, meaning for example no more exclusive private rights to NIH-financed inventions and no more revolving doors between academic institutions and pharmaceutical executive boards. Don't hold your breath, we live in an era of systematic insitutional corruption that Trofim Lysenko would have fit right into.