Trust Isn’t Given, It’s Earned: How Science Can Win Back Public Confidence

Modern science has done astonishing things. It eradicated smallpox, helped bring once-devastating diseases under control, explored the solar system, and connected billions of people through technologies that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. But as we’ve clearly seen, achievements don’t automatically translate into trust.

Public confidence can prove surprisingly brittle when science collides with politics and culture. We see it in everything from vaccine skepticism and climate denial to a myriad of conspiracy theories. For years, discussions about this problem have focused largely on misinformation and polarization, and both do matter enormously. But at the 75^th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, a panel on rebuilding trust in science focused on what scientists themselves can do to address the issue. According to the panel, that means admitting uncertainty, correcting mistakes quickly, resisting hype, and treating the public as a partner rather than a passive audience.

Trust Begins With Belonging

The 2026 Meeting ended on Mainau Island, where Nobel Laureates and hundreds of Young Scientists gathered after crossing Lake Constance by boat. Against a serene backdrop of gardens and water, the final panel confronted a less idyllic question: why should anyone trust science?

The discussion brought together Nobel Laureates Saul Perlmutter, Donna Strickland and Randy Schekman; European Research Council President Maria Leptin; early-career researchers Chevarra Hansraj and Yentli Soto Albrecht; and moderator Stefan Kaufmann. Despite coming from varied fields ranging from physics to medicine, biology and research policy, they converged on an unexpectedly simple idea: trust grows when scientists are honest about uncertainty and transparent; when scientists explain not only what they know, but how they came to know it.

“We hear the words ‘trust in science,’” Kaufmann opened the session. “What is the first thought that comes to your mind?”

For Hansraj, a theoretical physicist at Stellenbosch University, trust operates on two levels.

“There’s responsible science (do people accept the findings, the evidence) and then there’s relational trust: do people feel that science is for them, that they belong within it?” she said. “My experience basically says that the second is prior… the belief is going to follow the belonging.”

Hansraj’s argument reflects a growing body of science communication research suggesting that trust is shaped not just by evidence but also by identity and individual beliefs. When scientists are perceived as a remote elite or an out-group, evidence alone can do little to change minds. Creating opportunities for participation, highlighting shared identities and fostering a sense of belonging can strengthen trust far more effectively than simply presenting more facts.

A Relationship That Survives Uncertainty

For Soto Albrecht, an MD-PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, trust in science is deeply personal. She studies ALS while herself carrying a mutation associated with it. Her father died from the disease. She now moves through the scientific world as a researcher, someone at risk and an advocate for families confronting devastating uncertainty.

“Trust in science is a relationship that survives uncertainty, and that we can maintain with communication and action,” she said. “For some people that relationship is a lifeline.”

Scientists often worry that openly discussing uncertainty will confuse the public or weaken confidence. SotoAlbrecht argued almost the opposite. Hiding uncertainty can make the eventual change in advice feel like deception. However, clear communication doesn’t mean pretending that every question has a simple answer. It means explaining complexity in language people can understand while being honest about what remains unknown.

“It’s really important to break down even the most complex concepts into lay terms,” she said. But scientists must also trust their audience.

“Relationships are two-way streets. Just as we ask patients to trust us and trust the science we’re doing, we can also trust them to hold on to that uncertainty.”

That idea kept emerging throughout the discussion. If scientists ask the public to have faith in the scientific process, then researchers should return the favor by trusting people with a fuller, messier account of how that process works.

Science Looks for Its Own Mistakes

Perlmutter, who has spent years promoting scientific reasoning beyond the laboratory, argued that researchers sometimes forget how unusual their professional mindset can seem.

“Scientists are mostly spending our time trying to figure out what’s going wrong,” he said. “Have we misunderstood something about the measurement we just made?”

Research doesn’t advance because scientists avoid all errors, but rather because researchers build organized ways to find them. “Science is mostly trying to figure out where the mistakes are,” Perlmutter said, “and then what’s left is what we can have trust in,” the Laureate added.

That process became painfully visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Advice changed as researchers gathered evidence about transmission, treatments and the virus itself. To scientists, those revisions showed the process working well under extraordinary pressure. To many members of the public, they looked like proof that experts had been wrong. Perlmutter argued that better explanations and analogies could have helped.

“What we were doing was essentially the equivalent of playing a sports game against the virus,” he said. “You don’t come up with one play and use it for three years. You watch what the other team is doing, you adapt, and they adapt.”

Science Education Focuses on Answers Instead of Questions

Donna Strickland believes this type of misunderstanding begins in school. “I would like education to change,” she said. “Almost all science education is about the science that’s already been done. I would like every year of science education to include the idea that science is about not knowing. It’s not about knowing.”

Of course, education isn’t something you can change overnight. It’s not something scientists themselves can change on their own, either. So instead, Strickland has one particular piece of advice.

“The thing that I would like to see all scientists do – or stop doing – is overhyping their research,” Strickland said.

She recalled meeting someone who believed scientists had promised to produce a practical quantum computer within 20 years and had failed to deliver. Researchers often use such predictions as loose technical estimates. Outside academia, however, “within 20 years” sounds like a deadline.

Ultimately for Strickland, it also boils down to delivering a clear message, while also trusting the public to understand a complex message.

“We have to trust the public,” she said. “We have to be very clear what we mean.”

Leptin echoed that argument. Science is already remarkable, she said. It does not need inflated promises to command attention.

“For me, trust in science is about the fact that science is about the real world,” she said. “When we do an experiment, we’re asking nature—the real world—to answer our questions… Nature comes back with the truth, even if we don’t immediately get it.”

The problem begins when cautious findings pass through the publicity machine. We often see news stories about results observed in cells that become a “breakthrough” or a preliminary association that becomes a “potential cure”. This, like education, isn’t something that’s entirely within scientists’ control. Universities, journals, funding bodies, and news organizations all compete for attention. But researchers still have a responsibility to challenge misleading claims rather than enjoying the publicity while quietly objecting to the wording.

Leptin singled out phrases such as “this may cure cancer” as the kind of reflexive hype scientists should remove. Overselling research may attract attention in the short term, but it can create expectations that aren’t supported. When the promised revolution fails to arrive, disappointment becomes distrust.

Trust depends on correcting mistakes

The panel’s emphasis on scientific self-correction raised another difficult question. How well does that mechanism actually work?

Schekman brought academic publishing into the discussion. Millions of academic papers are published every year, and the number keeps growing. Researchers face intense pressure to produce frequent, novel and eye-catching results. Journals also compete for discoveries likely to generate citations and publicity.

That system rewards bold findings far more reliably than careful replications, negative results or corrections. It can also make proper scrutiny harder. Reviewers have limited time, editors manage growing numbers of submissions and other researchers may lack the incentives or resources to repeat published experiments.

“Mistakes are common, and they need to be corrected,” Schekman noted. But the problem is that corrections often arrive far too late, if they arrive at all. He pointed to striking studies showing that many influential biomedical findings could not be reproduced.

But perhaps the most infamous example is the infamous paper led by Andrew Wakefield as an example of what happens when correction comes too slowly.

Published in The Lancet in 1998, the small study helped popularize the false claim that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was connected to autism. The paper was deeply flawed, and the journal eventually retracted it. But the full retraction came in 2010, 12 years after publication. By then, the claim had escaped the scientific literature and become a central story of the modern anti-vaccine movement. That’s why it’s important for journals to move fast: because even if a paper is withdrawn, its effects don’t disappear.

“Editors of journals should bear responsibility for taking note of errors that are brought to their attention and should act expeditiously.”

Trust Through Belonging and Honesty

Ultimately, the conversation returned to belonging.

Evidence matters, transparency matters, fast corrections matter, but none of them can entirely overcome a relationship in which scientific authority feels culturally distant to people’s lives.

“When scientific authority feels remote – culturally, geographically – trust is harder to build,” she said. “People need to see themselves in science to have trust in it,” she said. “They need to see people like them achieving these goals.” Today she mentors young women interested in science because representation changes expectations.

Hansraj now mentors young women interested in science because representation changes what people believe is possible. It can also change how scientific institutions are perceived by communities that have historically been excluded from them.

Soto Albrecht’s outreach follows a similar principle. After losing her father to ALS, she explains cutting-edge neuroscience in plain language without disguising what researchers still do not know. Rather than demanding blind faith, she tries to build a partnership with patients and families whose lives depend on scientific progress.

For researchers, that’s perhaps the most actionable piece of advice: trust can’t be repaired through messaging alone. It has to be demonstrated through behavior. Above all, we have to show (not merely tell) the public how science works. As Perlmutter observed, the scientists most deserving of trust are not those who claim absolute certainty. They are “the ones who’ve shown that they are looking for where their own mistakes are.”