How Science Can Keep Public Trust in an Age of Doubt and Disinformation

Most of us trust science every single day, usually before breakfast. We drink treated water, check complex weather forecasts, take medication, use GPS, board planes, and trust that the processed food in the fridge won’t poison us. All of that relies on science that almost none of us can personally verify.

That’s the bargain science makes with the public. You don’t rerun the vaccine trial or inspect the climate models. You trust the chain: the researchers who collected the data, the reviewers who checked it, the journals that published it, the institutions that backed it, and the regulators who acted on it. For most of modern life, this bargain worked remarkably well. But it’s a fragile agreement that may be starting to crack.

We keep hearing more and more about distrust in science, and we’re seeing the effects of science skepticism everywhere around us. But when people lose trust in science, are they rejecting experiments, evidence, or reason outright? Or are they questioning the machinery that turns evidence into authority? Do they care if the methodology was truly sound, or rather about who paid for the study and whether an inconvenient result may have been buried?

Those are not illogical questions to ask, and scientists shouldn’t ignore public opinion. Because although distrust in science can be highly politicized and external influences do matter, if science is to tackle this problem head-on, it should start with a good hard look in the mirror.

What Is Modern Science?

Modern science isn’t carried out by lone geniuses in quiet rooms, and it’s changed quite a lot since the days of the early naturalists. It’s a highly collaborative process that almost always builds on small, incremental steps. In practice, this means researchers and teams compete for grants, manage short-term contracts, train students, build partnerships, and then turn the work into papers that journals will accept. Hopefully. In practice, things are much harder and over time, have created the infamous “publish or perish” culture.

That may sound dramatic, but the pressure is real. Careers often depend on publication counts, citation metrics, grant income, and the ability to produce a steady stream of results. A careful study that finds nothing may be valuable, but it’s unlikely to make headlines or get a promotion. A messy but exciting result, by contrast, can lead to a high-profile paper, a press release, conference invitations, and more funding.

None of this means science or scientists are corrupted. The vast majority are trying to do good work inside the system. But incentives do matter, and when the system prizes speed and a certain type of results, it can quietly tilt science. It can also erode public trust (whether justifiably or not).

Most people who don’t work in science have (at best) a vague understanding of how this process actually works. But they can still sense that the process around science is accelerated and pushed by career pressure, money, and attention.

This is where trust can start to fray. Another source of tension is money.

The Commercialization of Science

Commercialization has become one of the central tensions in modern science. On one hand, it is hard to imagine modern life without it. Basic discoveries often need companies, investors, patents and manufacturing systems before they can become vaccines, cancer drugs, clean-energy technologies or new materials. A finding in a university lab doesn’t help anyone if it never leaves the lab.

But commercialization also changes the atmosphere in which science is done, and it changes how science is perceived. A discovery is no longer only a contribution to knowledge, offered to the world. It can become intellectual property, a start-up, a licensing agreement, a press release or a product pipeline. Universities, once imagined as sanctuaries for open inquiry, increasingly operate as engines of innovation and economic growth. Plus, new discoveries are increasingly made by companies.

That shift can subtly reshape scientific priorities. Research that leads to a patent may become easier to fund than research that answers a basic question, while projects with a clear commercial application may look more attractive than one whose value is uncertain or long-term. A negative result may be crucial for public health, but it rarely attracts investors, headlines or institutional celebration.

Yet again, the danger isn’t that money automatically corrupts science. The danger is that money can bend incentives. A study can still have methods, statistics, peer review and citations while being shaped from the beginning by a sponsor’s interests. The bias may enter through the research question, the design of the experiment, the choice of comparison group, the interpretation of results or the decision about whether unfavorable findings are published at all.

Is this commercialization good for science? There’s no simple answer, but the topic will be addressed in a Synergy Talk at this year’s meeting.

But in addition to the effect on science itself, this can also impact public trust. The public understands, at least intuitively, that the person paying for evidence may have a stake in what the evidence says (the funding effect is well documented). Disclosure helps, but it does not solve the problem. A conflict of interest listed at the end of a paper does not tell readers how deeply that interest shaped the study before they ever saw it.

Perhaps it also helps to explain why trust in science is so uneven.

Trust Is High, But Not Everywhere

Judging by what we see in the public discourse, it’s easy to think that trust in science is collapsing. That’s not really the case.

A 2025 Nature Human Behaviour study surveyed 71,922 people in 68 countries and found that, in most countries, most people trust scientists. Most also want scientists to engage more with society and policymaking. The authors concluded there is “no widespread lack of trust in scientists,” though distrust among a minority can still matter politically.

In the United States, where science has been heavily politicized, scientists are still well-trusted. Pew Research Center reported in January 2026 that 77% of U.S. adults have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests. That is still high compared with many institutions, though it is below the 87% recorded in April 2020, early in the pandemic. The partisan split is also stark: 90% of Democrats expressed at least fair confidence in scientists, compared with 65% of Republicans.

In the UK, recent data found that 82% of the public said scientists make a valuable contribution to society, while in the EU, scientists constantly rank among the most trusted categories of people. A 2024 report found that 74% of the EU population trusts scientists to tell the truth about new innovations, compared to just 47% of journalists and 45% of government leaders.

Outside the West, trust is uneven rather than simply low. The Wellcome Global Monitor found that 72% of people globally trusted scientists, but that trust varied sharply by region: around a third of people in Central Asia had “high” trust, compared with about one in ten in Central and South America. Low trust was most common in Central Africa, Southern Africa, and South America, where nearly one in three people had low trust in scientists. As science becomes more commercialized, it seems logical that people who see the benefits trust it more.

Of course, education, institutions, and inequality all matter. Science, of course, can’t fix every political, economic, or social reason for distrust. But it can address what happens when that fails.

The broad topic will also be addressed at the panel discussion “How to Rebuild Trust in Science?”

Doubt Can Be Manufactured

It can be tempting to put all the weight on scientists and the public. But this would be omitting a key element: third parties who, intentionally or not, distort public opinion. Bad-faith actors don’t necessarily need to prove science wrong. Often, they only need to make it look unsettled.

The tobacco industry showed how well that works.

As evidence mounted that cigarettes caused cancer, tobacco companies did not simply say “the science is false.” They funded research, elevated friendly experts, emphasized uncertainty, and kept the public argument alive. The goal was not to prove smoking safe. It was to keep doubt alive long enough to delay regulation. This turned out to be remarkably effective, and this playbook became a template that others used as well.

The fossil fuel industry used a similar strategy on climate change.

Companies didn’t need to overturn the physics of greenhouse gases. They only needed to make climate action look premature, extreme, or economically reckless. They created doubts and stalled. A tiny minority of dissenting voices was amplified until settled science sounded like a political argument. We’re still fighting the effects of this today, as disinformation campaigns greatly impacted beliefs on climate change.

This is why this disinformation is so corrosive. It starts with real features of science like uncertainty, disagreement, revision, or caution. Then it twists them.

Science cannot treat this as a side issue. With so much modern research tied to commercial products (drugs, vaccines, devices, algorithms, energy technologies) and with outside actors able to shape public opinion at an enormous scale, science becomes vulnerable when it retreats into the ivory tower.

Again, science can’t stop every bad-faith campaign. It can’t prevent powerful industries, political groups, or media figures from politicizing science. But it can make that job harder.

That starts with showing its work. When evidence is produced behind closed doors, published slowly, corrected quietly, or filtered through journals few people can access, it becomes easier for others to misrepresent it. The more opaque the process looks, the easier it is to claim that something is being hidden.

So trust is not just about better communication after a paper is published. It also depends on the place where scientific authority is first granted: the scientific literature itself.

Scientific Publishing Is Suffering

Academic journals are an integral part of modern science, and that is starting to become a problem.

The scientific publishing system was built for a slower world. A journal paper was once the final stop in a long process: researchers submitted their work, a few experts reviewed it, editors made a judgment, and the result entered the scientific record. But modern science moves faster, produces far more papers, and now includes preprints, massive datasets, AI-assisted writing, global collaborations, and fields where results can spread publicly before peer review is finished. That has led scientific publishing to a bizarre place.

In theory, the system is simple: researchers submit work, experts review it, editors judge it, and reliable findings enter the scholarly record. In practice, the system is overloaded.

Between 2016 and 2022, the number of indexed scientific articles rose by about 47%, while the pool of qualified reviewers did not keep pace. Generative AI could make that flood worse.

Peer review already depends on a huge amount of unpaid labor. One estimate found that researchers spent more than 100 million hours reviewing papers in 2020 alone.

Publishers, meanwhile, can make extraordinary profits from this system. Just five major publishers account for around half of all papers published. Scientific publishing is often described as an oligopoly with high profit margins reaching 30% or even 40%. This gives scientific publishing one of the highest profit margins in all industries (let alone just publishing), even when many fields of science are started for funding.

Open Access was supposed to democratize science. Instead, in many cases, it shifted the barrier from reading to publishing. Article Processing Charges (APCs can run from $1,000 to more than $10,000 per article, pricing out researchers without major institutional or grant support — especially scholars in the Global South. The result is a scientific record that can look “open” while still filtering whose knowledge gets seen.

Then, on top of all this, came the paper mills. These are businesses that sell fake manuscripts, fabricated data, authorship slots, and manipulated peer review. In 2023, more than 10,000 papers were retracted, with paper mills and compromised journals driving much of the crisis.

No doubt, new approaches to publishing are necessary. This too will be discussed at a Synergy Talk at this year’s meeting.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Science cannot regain trust by pretending to be untouched by money, politics or human weakness. It can’t regain trust while hiding in an ivory tower, either.

The public’s trust can’t be gained (or regained) by claiming the old system was pure, or that it’s the public’s fault. You can’t just say “trust the science” and end the conversation. Science earns trust when people can see how it works.

Science earns its authority and trust from its internal process: finding errors, weeding out bad studies, and producing verifiable results. In the age of commercialization, post-truth, and AI, that still hasn’t changed. If science can shift its incentives and reward corrections, retractions, replications, and negative results. We are likely on a better path.

That is why this conversation fits so naturally with the spirit of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. Lindau is built on the idea that science is not just a body of results, but a living culture: older and younger researchers meeting, questioning, arguing, explaining, and passing on standards that cannot be captured by metrics alone.

In that sense, rebuilding trust isn’t only about better journals or incentives. It’s about keeping science visibly human and intellectually honest. It is about showing the public that science advances through scrutiny, humility, correction, and exchange — the very things that gatherings like Lindau are meant to protect.