“The cacophony of ‘science experts’ has done a lot of harm”

There are count­less pro­grams, sym­posi­ums or art­icles ded­ic­ated to an alleged rise of sus­pi­cion towards sci­ence. What is your view?

It is indeed a fre­quent theme. How­ever, opin­ion polls show a more nuanced real­ity. When the ques­tion is more gen­er­ic (“Do you trust research­ers from pub­lic insti­tu­tions to tell the truth about their research top­ics?”), two thirds of respond­ents answer ‘yes’. Even though, in some cases, the out­look can be much dark­er – par­tic­u­larly with regards to med­ic­al top­ics¹. Yet, the fact remains that, in gen­er­al, there is more con­fid­ence in sci­ence than in politi­cians. I do not think how­ever that there is a feel­ing of mis­trust towards sci­ence across the board, so we need to exam­ine each case carefully. 

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I see two prob­lems linked to the issue of mistrust. 

The first is that it is a vague notion. We some­times dis­tin­guish ‘mis­trust’, a dif­fuse feel­ing, from ‘sus­pi­cion’, a struc­tured atti­tude based on either good or bad reas­ons. The reas­ons for which should be invest­ig­ated because there are oth­er close notions with dif­fer­ent implic­a­tions; ‘hes­it­a­tion’, for example. It is widely stud­ied in regard to vac­cines, but it is not the same as mis­trust or sus­pi­cion. I also think about ‘con­fu­sion’, which can have the same effects as sus­pi­cion, in terms of dis­missal. How­ever, it reflects the absence of reli­able points of ref­er­ence, or the dif­fi­culty to dif­fer­en­ti­ate seem­ingly close real­it­ies. In the lat­ter situ­ation, the caco­phony between the expert­ise of agen­cies and experts on TV shows for example has cre­ated a great deal of con­fu­sion. In a much broad­er sense, it is at the heart of the “infodem­ic” concept revived by the World Health Organ­isa­tion (WHO) since Feb­ru­ary 2020. 

A dis­tinc­tion is some­times made between dis­trust, which is a dif­fuse atti­tude, and mis­trust, which is an atti­tude struc­tured by reasons.

The second prob­lem is that objec­ti­fy­ing this defi­ance, if it exists, and tak­ing it for gran­ted a little too fast, can have an effect on the demo­crat­ic debate. What is the use of try­ing to con­vince people of the valid­ity of a meas­ure if a large part of the pop­u­la­tion is con­sidered to be opposed to it as a mat­ter of prin­ciple? Last autumn, there was much talk about an import­ant and rel­at­ively recent form of mis­trust from French people towards vac­cines. Even though at the time no Cov­id-19 vac­cine was avail­able yet, which made any declar­a­tion highly abstract. In addi­tion, the begin­ning of the Cov­id-19 vac­cin­a­tion cam­paign showed a wide­spread desire to have access to vac­cin­a­tion as soon as pos­sible (the hes­it­a­tion towards the AstraZeneca vac­cine being a sep­ar­ate case). In this par­tic­u­lar case, the beha­vi­our­al cri­terion – how will people con­cerned behave? – seems more rel­ev­ant to me than statements.

Some research­ers speak of com­munity phe­nom­ena. In oth­er words, where sci­ent­ists form part of an elite. As such, the work­ing class can’t identi­fy with them lead­ing to mis­trust towards them.  What is your opinion? 

It should be cla­ri­fied what is meant by “elite” here. Need­less to say, the daily life of research­ers is rather dif­fer­ent than the life­style of busi­ness elites. Except in some par­tic­u­lar cases, they are also detached from polit­ic­al decision-mak­ing: research­ers and engin­eers are far from over-rep­res­en­ted among polit­ic­al rep­res­ent­at­ives and senators. 

It seems to me that the prob­lem is instead linked to how we per­ceive sci­ence. It cor­res­ponds to at least three real­it­ies. First, there is our know­ledge of research, its con­di­tions, what it’s like to be a research­er. This usu­ally sparks interest, and some con­fer­ences, like the Sci­ence Fest­iv­al (Fête de la sci­ence), or well-made pop­ular­isa­tion videos, win over a wide audience. 

Second, there is the indi­vidu­al or col­lect­ive expert­ise, with­in an agency, a com­mis­sion, an organ­isa­tion, which is often mis­un­der­stood. Yet, gen­er­ally it is a pro­ced­ure that obeys very strict rules, can lead to bal­anced judg­ment, and even some­times includes a plur­al­ity of views. It col­lides with the image of ‘experts’ seen on news chan­nels, or even more gen­er­ally, with the media image of those who feel entitled to give their opin­ion on oth­er sci­entif­ic dis­cip­lines or issues just because they are qual­i­fied in a par­tic­u­lar field. This image of experts ‘in sci­ence’ does a lot of dam­age, and we have seen the emer­gence of many impro­vised epi­demi­olo­gists these past few months!

Finally, there is the case when sci­ence is used to jus­ti­fy a polit­ic­al decision (“we fol­low sci­ence”, “sci­ence says…”). Cri­ti­cism some­times falls on sci­ence when it is in fact raised against polit­ics. This last type of vis­ion seems to fall under what we once called “the lin­ear mod­el”. Basic­ally, only one policy stems from sci­entif­ic con­clu­sions, yet this is illus­ory. Even on sub­jects that are per­fectly stable from the sci­entif­ic point of view, wheth­er in the field of energy, health or the envir­on­ment, there is gen­er­ally a plur­al­ity of scen­ari­os. Decision-makers can­not hide behind research­ers or experts, but they can unfor­tu­nately ignore them.

It is com­mon that con­spir­acy the­or­ies have no sci­entif­ic basis. Could their alleged increase be a sign of the grow­ing mis­trust in science?

There is indeed cause for con­cern. For example, the doc­u­ment­ary Hold up, which was viewed mil­lions of times, mixes ques­tions on the SARS-CoV­‑2 vir­us with spec­u­la­tion on the real­ity of the out­break, the glob­al pro­ject named “the great reset”, not to men­tion 5G, and this can have a health impact. It is pos­sible that social net­works increase the vis­ib­il­ity of this phe­nomen­on. But, even when a con­spir­acy the­ory appears on a sub­ject covered by sci­entif­ic research as well, it is only part of the phe­nomen­on. For instance, many of Don­ald Trump’s voters are still con­vinced that the res­ult of the last elec­tion was a plot of the Democrats. 

Even if there is a resur­gence of con­spir­acy the­or­ies… they do not, or hardly ever, tar­get research as such.

It seems to me that this last con­spir­acy the­ory has severe con­sequences, and it gives no state­ment on sci­ence. If we use the lan­guage of sus­pi­cion, such an atti­tude reflects a lack of trust in insti­tu­tions, sus­pec­ted of fol­low­ing a secret agenda. Con­spir­acy the­or­ies on sci­entif­ic sub­jects are prob­ably only one aspect of this gen­er­al atti­tude, only in this case they tar­get the par­tic­u­lar insti­tu­tion that is sci­ence. Per­haps it is more strik­ing because the idea that a sci­entif­ic state­ment could be the res­ult of a hid­den agenda con­flicts with the val­ues of uni­ver­sal­ity, truth and integ­rity pre­sup­posed by sci­ence. How­ever, if you look in detail, to my know­ledge, exist­ing con­spir­acy the­or­ies focus more on the second and third images of sci­ence men­tioned earli­er. We hardly see any con­spir­acy the­or­ies on black mat­ter or string the­ory, for example. All this would sug­gest that even if there is an increase in con­spir­acy the­or­ies, and even if we are right­fully con­cerned about some of their mani­fest­a­tions and we must address them when know­ledge is threatened, they do not neces­sar­ily express defi­ance towards sci­ence nor tar­get research itself.