In January 2025, the journal Nature Human Behaviour published a 68-country survey on how people see scientists. Viktoria Cologna, Niels Mede and more than two hundred colleagues asked 71,922 people in 68 countries how much they trust scientists, and found that in most countries, most people do [1]. In most countries, most people also agreed that scientists should engage more in society and in policymaking [1].

That is not the story many of us have been hearing. For years the familiar line has been that public trust in science is collapsing. My reading of this study is more hopeful, and more specific. Trust has not vanished. People do see a weak spot, though, and it has less to do with how skilled scientists are than with whether they listen.

What the survey measured

The team ran the same online questionnaire in 37 languages between November 2022 and August 2023 [1]. The countries covered hold 79% of the world’s population, and each country’s sample was weighted by age, gender and education [1]. That is a huge effort, but it is worth being clear about what it is. It is a large set of online samples from 68 countries, not a poll of everyone on Earth. The authors themselves say that running it online “considerably limited the representability of populations in certain countries with lower Internet penetration” [1]. In a few countries the survey ran in English or French rather than the most common local language, which probably tilted those samples toward more educated people [1].

Instead of one question, they measured trust with 12 items grouped into four parts: competence, integrity, benevolence (whether scientists care about people) and openness [1]. On a scale from 1 (very low) to 5 (very high), the overall average came out at 3.62, which the authors call moderately high, and no country showed low trust on average [1]. Three quarters of respondents agreed that scientific methods are the best way to find out whether something is true or false [1].

Where scientists scored lower

The four parts did not score the same. Competence came out on top at 4.02, with 78% of people saying scientists are qualified to do high-impact research [1]. Integrity and benevolence sat in the middle: 57% said most scientists are honest, and 56% said most scientists care about people’s well-being [1].

Openness came last, at 3.33. Only 42% of respondents said scientists pay attention to other people’s views [1]. In plain terms, many people think scientists know what they are doing but are less sure scientists are listening.

I think that gap is the most useful finding in the paper. You cannot fix a reputation for incompetence with a better conversation. You can fix a reputation for not listening, at least partly, because listening is something scientists choose to do or not do.

The fair case for worry

None of this means the worry about trust is made up. In the United States, the Pew Research Center reported in November 2023 that Americans’ trust in scientists and positive views of science continue to decline. Its survey of 8,842 U.S. adults, run from September 25 to October 1, 2023, found that 73% still had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests, but that share was 14 points lower than early in the pandemic [2]. The share saying they had not too much or no confidence rose from 12% in April 2020 to 27% [2].

That is a real change, and Pew can see it because it asks similar questions over time. The 68-country study is a single snapshot and cannot show a trend in any one country [1]. So I do not read the global result as a rebuttal of the American numbers. Both can be true at once: trust can be moderately high on average across many countries and still be falling in some of them.

The global study also shows plenty of variation. Trust was relatively low in Russia and several former Soviet states, for example [1]. Within countries, trust was higher among women, older people, city residents and people with more education, among other groups [1]. The authors are careful here too. They write that “lack of trust in scientists by even a small minority needs to be taken seriously” [1], and they add that they “do not mean to imply that trust is always warranted” [1].

What people want from scientists

The most encouraging number in the paper may be this one: 83% of respondents agreed that scientists should communicate about science with the public [1]. People want scientists to show up and talk.

They also have views on what science should work on. Improving public health came first, followed by solving energy problems and reducing poverty [1]. Poverty reduction showed the biggest gap between what people want scientists to prioritize and what they think scientists are actually doing [1]. I read that as another listening problem. If people feel their concerns are missing from the research agenda, it makes sense that they would doubt whether scientists are paying attention.

The authors’ own advice follows from this. They suggest scientists could be “more receptive to feedback and more transparent about their funding and data sources,” and they recommend “avoiding top-down communication but encouraging public participation in genuine dialogue” [1]. That advice is about how scientists talk and listen, rather than about winning arguments, and I think that is the right emphasis.

Listening is part of the job

This matters to me personally. I am an AI researcher who builds tools for medical imaging, and I write this blog to explain science to people outside the lab. A blog is mostly one-way, which is exactly the kind of top-down communication the authors warn about, so the study is a useful nudge for me as well.

So what would listening look like in practice? For scientists, it means answering questions in plain words, saying who paid for the work, and taking the rattle in the engine seriously when someone mentions it. For everyone else, it means asking those questions, and noticing the difference between a scientist who explains and one who only announces. The next time you see a headline about the end of trust in science, check which country it describes and whether it tracks change over time. The real picture is less dramatic and more useful: in most of the 68 countries surveyed, most people still trust scientists, and they would trust them more if they felt heard.

References

[1] V. Cologna, N. G. Mede, S. Berger, J. Besley, C. Brick, M. Joubert, et al., “Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries,” Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 713-730, Apr. 2025, doi: 10.1038/s41562-024-02090-5.

[2] Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Positive Views of Science Continue to Decline,” Nov. 14, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/11/14/americans-trust-in-scientists-positive-views-of-science-continue-to-decline/