Why does the British public trust doctors so much more than scientists?
Posted on March 13, 2008 by tracyplayle in Science CommunicationA lot of my work is around communicating science, or working with education bodies. So, every year I am interested to see how certain professions fare in MORI’s annual survey of trust in different professions.
Catching up on reading my backlog of publications that have fallen on my desk over the past few weeks, I was delighted to see that February’s edition of Profile magazine (the CIPR’s main publication) featured the results of this year’s trust survey, announced on 5 March. I wasn’t quite so delighted, however, to see that public trust in scientists has fallen by 7 per cent since last year’s survey – the largest change in any of the professions.
The poll asks respondents whether they would ‘generally trust them to tell the truth or not’, and lists 16 professions to compare. Doctors come out top in this survey, with 90 per cent of respondents saying they would trust them to tell the truth. By comparison, just 65 per cent of respondents claim that they would trust scientists to tell the truth.
This difference insterests me and I think its a challenge of those involved in science communication to address this. Is the difference in perception caused by the public’s exposure to these professions? It’s highly likely that most of the public know their doctor and see them every so often, but how many members of the public know a scientist or someone that they would call a scientist? To some extent we might also question why doctors are even separated out from scientists in this poll. Aren’t doctors also scientists, afterall?
Perhaps if we could communicate the work of scientists and science-related professions more effectively, and put a more human face on science, there wouldn’t be such a marked difference in trust between doctors and scientists.
