During the EU referendum campaign in 2016, British politician Michael Gove suggested that the public had had enough of experts.  He proposed that experts were so often wrong they could no longer be trusted or relied upon.  Whilst the result of that referendum might suggest that trust in experts has been dented (as nearly all advocated remaining), a recent study by Queen Mary University of London suggests the trust in experts has held steady.

The study, which consisted of three large scale experiments, found that people trust scientific experts considerably more than the government.

Each of the experiments asked participants to make a number of judgements about nudge style behavioral interventions that were designed to improve our decision making.  Sometimes the nudges were introduced by scientists, whilst at other times they were introduced by government officials.  The nudges themselves were a mixture of actual ones that had been implemented in real life and fictitious ones.

Faith in expertise

Interestingly, the study revealed that faith was higher in experts than in the government officials, even when the nudges were fictitious.

“While people judged genuine nudges as more plausible than fictitious nudges, people trusted some fictitious nudges proposed by scientists as more plausible than genuine nudges proposed by government. For example, people were more likely trust the health benefits of coffee stirring than exercise if the former was recommended by scientists and the latter by government,” the authors say.

The authors believe that their findings counter the perceived notion that our faith in experts has been knocked, at least in comparison with that in government experts.  Participants in both the UK and US regarded the scientists very favorably, even when their advice wasn’t really that good.  The findings also found however that people were sceptical about nudges where they may have been manipulated without their knowledge.  Trust in such circumstances was considerably lower than previously.

The team hope that their findings are useful, not least because nudges have become increasingly popular in governments around the world, with deployments in areas such as health and personal finance.

“Overall, the public make pretty sensible judgments, and what this shows is that people will scrutinise the information they are provided by experts, so long as they are given a means to do it. In other words, ask the questions in the right way, and people will show a level of scrutiny that is often not attributed to them. So, before there are strong claims made about public opinion about experts, and knee-jerk policy responses to this, it might be worth being a bit more careful about how the public are surveyed in the first place,” the authors conclude.