Facets of Trust in Science: Researchers can be perceived as ethical and competent despite inconsistent research results

The public perception of science and scientists themselves has become a much-debated topic in recent years. In this article, we contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the public’s trust in science by focussing on the practices of science, which are often not known by the public. Building on previous research by Ebersole, Axt and Nosek (2016), we conducted a preregistered, quota-sampled survey in Austria (N = 564), where we presented participants with different scenarios about scientific practices. Thereby, we disentangled the perception of scientists–i.e., how competent and ethical they are being perceived–from the confidence in their scientific findings–i.e., how correct their results are being perceived. For instance, when “a researcher X conducted a study with an interesting finding, which he then publishes”, this researcher was–in our study– perceived as averagely competent and ethical, and the findings were perceived as neither correct nor incorrect (but somewhere in between). However, if “another researcher Y tried to replicate X’s finding, but failed - and X then criticized Y’s methodology and dismissed the new study”, researcher X was perceived as less competent, less ethical and the original results were perceived as less correct by participants. Importantly, if researcher X “acknowledges Y’s methodology” or “investigates the difference between the original study and the failed replication”, ratings for X’s competence and ethical behavior were higher than for how correct his results were being perceived. Moreover, the highest competence and ethics ratings were obtained, when researcher X was described to share the methods and data online for transparency. Psychological dispositions of the participants, such as political orientation or motivation for cognition, did not seem to affect these ratings to a large degree. These results are discussed in the light of Mertonian norms of science, which highlight cooperativeness and disinterestedness.