On 01/06/2015, at 16:45, Katherine J Hepworth wrote:
> And most of all, I worry about the public's perceptions and the potential
> to undermine trust in experts.
Dear friends,
Haven't we all been witnessing this erosion for the entire duration of our lives?
Couldn't it be the case that trust in experts is something that is context-dependent?
I mean, don't we all mistrust MDs to some degree until that moment when we are helpless and have nobody else to turn to than the physician in front of us?
Besides, there are different levels of bias for or against experts.
I live in what you might call a poor neighborhood, full with people of low income and low education levels. Most of the male adults have had odd jobs in construction. Do you want to know their opinion of engineers and architects? The common saying goes something like "they were studying how to be stupid".
The thing is, "trust in experts" is something that is very hard to nail down. For people with higher education levels and higher incomes, trust in science and in rationality is higher (can't provide citations, but I read that in a recent study), and I have the intuition that trust in experts follows.
As for people with lower incomes and lower education levels, they tend to trust only those who actually help them. Their evaluations are highly subjective, completely biased, and fully related to context, seldom abstracted to higher level categories (hence the infamous Dunning–Kruger effect). There is no discovery, retraction or scandal to either raise or lower these people's opinion of experts: it's all gibberish to them, and they can't make sense of it.
This kind of reminds me of Gibson's ecological theory of perception and of theories of situated cognition. People in general, not being experts themselves, tend to trust or mistrust experts as a function of their own subjective experiences.
The real problem, it seems to me, is that policy makers in general are (for all intents and purposes) like my neighbors: the language of experts is gibberish to them, so they focus on visible effects. And so it is that politicians will shun expertise when their perceived value is elsewhere, or they will prosecute experts when they hurt their bottom line (see the recent example of italian politicians prosecuting seismologists).
Afterthought: I find it interesting that we ("we" researchers) create and adhere to all sorts of theories (in this case, I'm talking about situated cognition) but fail to apply those theories to ourselves.
Best regards,
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Carlos Pires
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Design & New Media MFA // Communication Design PhD Student @ FBA-UL
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