Alienation and Trust in Climate Scientists in the United States

A sizeable share of the U.S. public does not trust climate scientists. Prominent psychological accounts attribute a lack of trust in science generally to individual cognitive failings—knowledge deficits, motivated reasoning, or conspiracist thinking—locating the causes of a lack of trust within the individual. Here, we test an account that focuses on structural causes: the alienation model. It suggests that people who are excluded from expert institutions feel alienated from them, which fosters a lack of trust in these institutions and the people governing them. We conceptualize alienation along four dimensions—spatial, social, institutional, and informational. We then test predictions of the alienation model for trust in climate scientists. In preregistered analyses of a sample of U.S. adults quota-matched to census margins (N = 26,951), perceptions of alienation from climate science and scientists were associated with structural factors: on average, participants who lived further away from postsecondary institutions perceived greater spatial alienation, participants with lower household income perceived greater social alienation, and participants who were demographically underrepresented among scientists (in terms of gender and race) in some cases perceived greater institutional and social alienation. Greater perceived alienation was in turn associated with lower trust in climate scientists for the spatial, social, and informational dimensions, but not for the institutional dimension. Most of these associations replicated within Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. The findings are correlational, but they suggest that a lack of trust in climate scientists need not reflect individual cognitive failings, and may in part be rooted in structural exclusion from science.