In this month’s Scientific American, Daniel Willingham describes a friend who clings ferociously to the discredited belief that vaccines cause autism.  The puzzle?

“My friend insists that he trusts scientists.  In this respect, he is like most Americans. In a 2008 survey by the National Science Foundation, more respondents expressed “a great deal” of confidence in science leaders than in leaders of any other institution except the military. On public policy issues, Americans believe that science leaders are more knowledgeable and impartial than leaders in other sectors of society, such as business or government. Why do people say that they trust scientists in general but part company with them on specific issues?”

Of course, in this specific instance, it could simply be our well-documented willingness to seek information that confirms our beliefs and hold fast to those beliefs in the face of discrediting information.  But I think Daniel has a point:  People’s expressed trust in scientists doesn’t really mesh with the trust revealed by their behaviour.

So, why do people say they trust scientists but fail to trust scientific findings?  I have three thoughts:

1. They have low trust in the funders and gatekeepers of scientific research:  Government, industry, and the press.  They think that the ‘real’ findings are out there, but are being hidden or repressed by scientists’ various nefarious masters.
2. They are bad at distinguishing good science from junk science.  Both quacks and legitimate scientists hold PhDs.  The distinctions that help us make sense of which to trust are either non-obvious to laypeople and/or depend on trust in the other institutions mentioned above.
3. It’s hard to know what the scientific consensus is on an issue from press coverage alone.  What’s the best-supported position on any given issue?  You’d have a hard time gleaning it on just about any topic from press coverage.  Press coverage doesn’t meta-analyze — it often provides a he-said/she-said account with equal time allotted to talking heads from two sides of an issue.

Update:

Steve Saideman’s suggested answer is perfect in that it offers both snark and parsimony:

4.  It requires reading.

“Countries can get caught in a trust trap in which inequality and mistrust feed on one another.”

A fascinating entry (“In Equality We Trust”) in the NY Times’ Economix blog about the effects of income inequality on trust and vice versa.

In the Ottawa Citizen, Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute assures us that record-low voter turnout is nothing to worry about.  In fact, he argues, it’s a sign of social cohesion:

Contrary to the folklore of democratic health, low turnout can signal social solidarity, reflect real civic virtue, and even make democracy work better.

We humans are adversarial beings, easily riled by us-versus-them conflict. (Even Canadians!) Democratic politics is a wonderful way to peacefully channel social antagonism into ritual symbolic warfare… 

Lower levels of turnout may suggest that voters actually trust each other more — that fewer feel an urgent need to vote defensively, to guard against competing interests or ideologies. Is it really all that bad if a broad swath of voters, relatively happy with the status quo, sit it out from a decided lack of pique?

Of course, there’s something to this argument in certain cases.  Have a look at some instances of very high voter turnout — the 1973 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, for example.  Intergroup conflict and siege mentalities can certainly drive people to the ballot box.  And in the US, there’s some evidence that in some races, voter turnout is being driven by mobilizing polarized bases.

But is low turnout necessarily an indicator of high trust in one another?

Nuh-uh.

Have a look at this diagram, from research conducted by Robert Boeckmann and Tom Tyler:

What this shows is that there is a significant link between generalized trust (people’s overall trust in one another) and political engagement (voting).

The overall story here is that when civic engagement is high (when people socialize with neighbours, read local news, and discuss local issues with their neighbours and community leaders), it builds a sense that those around us are generally trustworthy.  And when we see our fellow citizens as trustworthy, we tend to do the civic-minded thing and show up to the ballot box.

So, despite Wilkinson’s optimism, I don’t buy the idea that low turnout signals is a signal of a shiny, happy, trusting polity.

“Convincing smiles are to some extent a signal of the intrinsic character of trustees: less honest individuals find smiling convincingly more difficult. They are also informative about the greater amounts that trustees playing for higher stakes have available to share: it is harder to smile convincingly if you have less to offer.”

— Centorrino, Djemai, Hopfensitz, Milinski & Seabright, 2011 [PDF, via]

Photo:  My most authentic smile.  Don’t you find me trustworthy?

Are Republicans really suspicious of government?  Maybe not.

Mike Sances presents some data over at The Monkey Cage that suggest that both Democrats and Republicans’ trust in government is essentially a partisan matter:  Republicans are more trusting of Republican officeholders, while Democrats tend to be more trusting of government when Democrats are in office.

This bolsters Fabio Roja’s recent observation about American political ideology and the size of government:

“The difference between liberals and conservatives is not that one is for more government and the other wants less government. They just want government to do different things.”

Early university admission programs tend to be unfair:  The offers are made before financial aid decisions, meaning they can only really be taken by the wealthy.  Harvard and Princeton got rid of them, in part, on this basis.

Only problem:  Nobody followed suit.  Other universities continued to offer early admission, and this week, both Harvard and Princeton decided they no longer wanted to be the unilateral cooperators in a field of defectors.

Princeton’s President, Shirley Tilghman:

“In eliminating our early program four years ago, we hoped other colleges and universities would do the same and they haven’t.”

For a program like this to succeed, I think there needs to be an institutional underpinning.  The unilateral action of a couple schools (even leaders like Harvard and Pton) won’t resolve this social dilemma.

What is needed is a way to get schools to collectively commit to ending early admission, and create strong enough sanctions to keep any single school from defecting, accepting early admissions, and reaping the benefits.

But what might an institutional solution look like?

One thing that springs to mind are the institutional arrangements for the shared handling of undergraduate applications.

Imagine if schools that viewed each other as competitors for the same students (say, the 60ish heavyweights of the Association of American Universities) created a new centralized agency for centralizing their application processes, or expanded the ambit of the Common Application group to include a policy role.  They could set shared policies for applications (for example, no early admission); only schools who played ball on these shared policies would be able to benefit from the pool of applicants and cost savings associated with centralization.

Unfortunately, such institutional arrangements may be challenging. Previous attempts at coordination (on aid policies, through the Overlap Group) attracted the attention of the antitrust jakes at the Justice Department, leaving schools skittish about coordination.

It’s unfortunate that both Harvard and Princeton have had to roll back an important step toward diversity and access in higher education.  I admire their verve in trying to set an example — but I’m pretty confident the early admissions dilemma won’t be solved with unilateral action.

“Complete contracts are inevitably imperfect. So what’s better: a complete contract that mutates goodwill into legal trickery, or an incomplete contract that rests on the understanding we share of appropriate and inappropriate behavior?”

— Dan Ariely.  Real talk.