what it would take for the public to trust science

On July 19, the President posted on the social media platform that he owns:

The National Academy of Sciences has historically published analytical Scientific Manuals expressly for our Federal Judiciary. Of course, the Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change. These bogus Manuals were used by Judges to decide massive “Climate Change” Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country. These Manuals have been totally DISCREDITED. Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate. With this TRUTH, I hereby order Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials to review this conduct. Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

When I heard about this post, I assumed that I would trust the National Academies manual that Trump was denouncing. This was an interesting reaction because I had not seen the document.

I then looked at it (and you can too). It struck me as cogent, informative, and cautious. But I do not independently know whether its claims are true.

Nor do its authors. For the most part, the document refers to large, organized groups, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council. But consider a scientist whose work is very close to the natural phenomena: collecting and measuring atmospheric samples. This person knows what they are doing but not what everyone else’s samples show, let alone how to build the instruments that they all use. And current CO₂ concentrations are only some of the variables that we must measure to understand the climate. The vast majority of what any individual scientist knows comes from reports of what others have done.

As the report that Trump denounced says,

The Earth’s climate system is enormous and complex, consisting of many nested and interlinked subsystems, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. …. Owing to the breadth and complexity of the climate system, climate research spans many different scientific disciplines. For example, research on the physical science of climate and climate change (i.e., understanding of the physical properties of the climate system and how it is changing) encompasses: (1) mathematics and statistics; (2) basic sciences, e.g., physics and chemistry; (3) earth sciences, e.g., atmospheric sciences, climatology, physical geography, oceanography, meteorology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and cryospheric sciences; and (4) computer sciences and data analysis. Most climate research involves collaboration across these different fields (National Academies 2025)

The chemists must trust the oceanographers, who must trust the computer scientists. In fact, each chemist must trust the other chemists.

Perhaps all of science depends on trust, although that is less obvious in classic cases, like Galileo dropping objects from the Tower of Pisa, than in climate science. The study of the earth’s climate is intensely collaborative, involving many more people than could ever know each other. It depends on the Integrated Assessment Models, which have developed for more than fifty years (Van Beek, Hajer, Pelzer, van Vuuren & Cassen 2020). Anyone who contributes to these models must presume that the previous contributions have been generally reliable, even when new data changes some of the current findings.

Why do I trust those models? Why do I trust the National Academies summaries of them, or Karen Zraick’s New York Times article that drew my attention to Trump’s “TRUTH”?

On one hand, I have no doubt that the cautiously presented conclusions of the National Academies are valid. On the other hand, my confidence has a sociological explanation. Institutions like universities, scientific disciplines, and the Times have treated me well all my life. I have benefited from operating with an overall model that incorporates confidence in what these institutions say plus direct observations that concur with their findings. I have observed the climate get hotter in New England, but I only believe that this is a global trend and a function of humans’ burning carbon because I believe in institutions, like The New York Times, that report on institutions like the National Academies.

Few people are treated as well or have as much experience with these institutions as I do; I am a college professor in the United States. It is unreasonable to ask people to trust institutions that are unaccountable to them and distant from them. I think that scientific institutions can adjust their behavior to be somewhat less distant from the public, but they cannot bear that responsibility alone.

The classic solution has been intermediary organizations that obtain people’s trust and then independently present information. An important example was the 20th century city or town newspaper. In 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that 69 percent of Americans read a newspaper daily.

Some 20th century US newspapers had specific social or ideological slants, but the market was dominated by local monopoly publications. Like the broadcast television networks of the same period, newspapers would have presented the American Academies’ position on the climate as scientific truth. In those days, Trump’s response would have been much more marginal.

In 1998 and 2008, the GSS asked people whether we trust too much in science. In both years, those who never read a newspaper were much more likely to distrust science than those who did read one. When I made a model that controled for age, race, gender, and years of education, reading the newspaper still predicted less distrust in science, net of the other factors (p <.001).

This doesn’t mean that newspapers caused people to trust science. It could be the other way around–people who trusted science subscribed to newspapers. But I think that newspapers devoted resources and skill to building trust and then guided people’s reactions to other institutions, such as science.

The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily, and the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

All intermediary institutions have “business models” of some kind. A 20th century newspaper relied on subscribers and advertisers. An American high school typically gets most of its resources from local property taxes in return for training and minding the community’s teenagers and providing sports and entertainment. Among other things, a school teaches scientific findings and respect for science. Similarly, a public university in the United States offers job training and credentials, health services, quasi-professional sports, patented inventions, and high culture in return for tuition, donations, state subsidies, and fees. Meanwhile, the big social media platforms use algorithms to attract attention, which they sell to advertisers.

Each business model determines the institution’s results, including its impact on trust or distrust for science. Metropolitan daily newspapers tended to boost trust, while today’s social media degrade it.

Trust in science is not self-evidently good; in fact, we can trust too much. And the fact that most newspapers were local monopolies was problematic. They generated trust, but arguably at the expense of freedom. The question is whether we can invent business models for the 21st century that yield genuinely civic outcomes.

Sources: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence: Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; Van Beek, L., Hajer, M., Pelzer, P., van Vuuren, D., & Cassen, C. (2020). Anticipating futures through models: the rise of Integrated Assessment Modelling in the climate science-policy interface since 1970. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102191.

paradigms of attention

Leave a reply

Attention as selecting information to accomplish a task

Imagine that you run a laboratory in which you give people or animals stimuli (for instance, showing them shapes on a screen or making sounds) and you record their responses.

Sometimes, your subjects miss things in interesting ways. For example, in the Invisible Gorilla experiment, viewers are told to count how many times players pass a basketball, and most fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit who walks across the court (Chabris and Simon 2011).

This general approach dates back at least as far as Wilhelm Wundt’s psychology lab in Leipzig in the 1880s. Since World War II, psychologists have often posed an analogy between their subjects and computers–specifically, the large class of computers called “von Neumann Machines” (van Neumann 1945). These familiar devices have components that collect data (keyboards, cables, cameras), components that apply stored instructions to process data, components that store data, and components (such as printers and screens) that output the computed data.

Von Neuman sketched the design of a “very high speed automatic digital computing system” and then directed the team that built a prototype computer at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1948-51. According to his sketch, this machine’s computing function, its command function, and its memory function would “correspond to the associative neurons in the human nervous system.” The equivalents of our sensory and motor neurons would be “the input and the output organs of the device” (2.6).

If indeed a person or an animal is like a von Neumann machine, and it fails to notice something, the likely causes would seem to be a limitation of sensory function, a scarcity of computing power, or a failure of memory-storage. For example, if we miss the guy in the gorilla suit–as I did when I was first shown the video–it’s either because something was wrong with my eyes, I was focusing all my processing power on counting the basketball passes, or (conceivably) I saw the guy dressed as a gorilla but I failed to remember him. Most explanations emphasize limitations in our processing power, or “information-bottlenecks.” Then “attention” is whatever process we use to direct our finite processing capacity.

Attention as care for another person

Now imagine that you are observing two friends in a conversation. One tells the other a sad story, and you think that she seeks an expression of sympathy or compassion from the other. But instead of displaying any emotion in response to the story, the other begins to talk about himself.

Here it is unlikely that we will think of a computer or an information-bottleneck. The problem is not that Harry is receiving too much data to be able to process Sally’s story. The problem is motivational. Harry does not care enough about Sally, possibly because he cares too much about himself.

Von Neumann machines have no motives and do not care. Their designers do. Engineers can make machines that scan patients to assist with medical care or that identify enemy soldiers to destroy them. Such differences are crucial, but they are not caused by the machines. They are encoded in the machines’ design, which could be different and which can be changed. Further upstream is an institution, such as a hospital or an army, that paid for (or ordered) the machine to be built. Behind the institution are the people who designed, supported, and led it.

Thus, when we think about this second case, we are likely to ask what Harry and Sally want and possibly what the culture and society have taught or encouraged each of them to do–not about their cognitive limitations.

In fact, people can overcome their inability to grasp or process another’s story by devoting more time to it. In lab experiments, reaction-time is often treated as evidence of attention, but in relationships, the time that we devote to attending anything or anyone is a variable under our control. Indeed, some people choose to devote their whole lives to attending to one thing.

Attention as respect for something beyond me

Another example comes from Iris Murdoch:

If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal (2001, p. 87)

In his beautiful and important book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford quotes this passage and suggests that the same is true of “any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian,” when “one submits to things that have their own intractable ways. Such hardness is at odds with the ontology of consumerism” (p. 65).

In these cases, a person attends less to another human being than to a complex and integrated object, whether it is a motorcycle, a natural language, or a garden. Duration is a sign of attention. I am not attending to a foreign language unless I commit considerable time to studying it.

The important questions about attention

I have learned from the laboratory research on attention, and I am sure that I would learn more if I read more and would benefit from that study. But this whole literature seems only distantly relevant (if at all) to urgent concerns about attention:

What should we attend to?
Who should we attend to?
What should we do when we notice something about someone else?
Do we attend too much to some things? (Candidates: ourselves, our own pleasures and aversions, trivia, doomscrolling)
Do we attend too little to other things? (Candidates: nature, people who suffer)
Which actions tend to involve worthy attention? (Candidates: skilled manual crafts, “deep reading,” friendship, prayer)
Who and what affects our attention? Is their impact positive or negative?
How can we design contexts in which attention is more often beneficial?

Why the first paradigm came to dominate

Graham Burnett (2026) offers a compelling history of the idea that attention means selecting information to accomplish a task. He mentions that “a huge percentage of the laboratory research on human attention conducted in laboratories in the United States across the watershed decades of the last century was hot-war- and Cold War–directed inquiry into human abilities to track and trigger on a stimulus—work centrally concerned with military operations” (Burnett 2026). Partly due to funding from the Defense Department, but not only for that reason, psychologists used increasingly sophisticated tools for measuring responses to stimuli. I would also emphasize the powerful metaphor of von Neumann-style computers after 1945 and the genuinely fascinating, interdisciplinary field of cybernetics, which peaked in the 1960s. All of these factors help explain why so much research has treated attention as selection of data to process.

Burnett says, “if in the 1950s the entire budget of the U.S. Department of Defense had been rerouted to fund the attentional research of a set of Tibetan monks, we would surely have inherited by 2020 quite a different scientific literature on human attention. Probably less essentially ‘cybernetic,’ and, it stands to reason, less focused on a variety of operationally oriented ‘tasks.'”

As Burnett acknowledges, the fact that any body of research has contingent reasons does not invalidate it. Psychology labs have generated real findings about attention as a solution to cognitive limitations. It’s just that we need to understand other phenomena that also deserve the word “attention” and that seem barely connected to this experimental literature.

Weil’s alternative

Simone Weil (1909-1943) suggests a very different agenda. She begins her short essay (or long aphorism) on “Attention and Will” by announcing, “It is not about understanding new things, but—through patience, effort, and method—coming to understand self-evident truths with one’s whole being.”

As if imagining a psychology lab (although I doubt she had that in mind), she writes, “The will has power only over a few movements of a few muscles, associated with the model of moving nearby objects. I can will to place my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, or inspiration, or truth in thought were necessarily associated with postures of this kind, they could be objects of the will.” But the will is not what concerns Weil. “Attention is an entirely different thing.”

A bit later, she writes,

The poet creates beauty through attention fixed upon reality. The same is true of the act of love. To know that this man—who is hungry and thirsty—truly exists just as I do: that is enough; the rest follows of its own accord. The authentic, pure values ?of truth, beauty, and goodness in human activity arise from one and the same act: a certain application of full attention to the object. The sole aim of education should be to prepare for the possibility of such an act through the exercise of attention.

I conclude with a passage from the same essay:

Solitude: In what, then, does its value lie? For one is in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, the blossoming trees)—of things of lesser worth (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the superior capacity for attention. If only one could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being…

Sources: Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Harmony 2011); John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945); Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good (Routledge Classics, 2001); Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin 2009); Graham D. Burnett, “Human Attention as a Philosophical Problem: The Question, and the Nature of Questions,” Metaphilosophy 57:1-2 (2026): 3–22; Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce (Librairie Plon, 1947).

profiles of engaged scholars

Leave a reply

“Civically engaged political science (CER) research …. involves political scientists collaborating in a mutually beneficial way with people and groups beyond the academy to co-produce, share, and apply knowledge related to power or politics, contributing to self-governance” (Rasmussen et al 2021).

In this definition, the word “civic” refers to “How people govern themselves. Engaged research teams are self-governing collaborative groups (composed of community organizations, government actors, social movements, and others); their research strengthens self-governance for others.e with a central focus onquestions of power, politics, and governance.”

What does it look like to be involved in CER? Here are some successful trajectories. These are fictional profiles, but they are based on many real examples that I have known. I share the list partly to broaden people’s conceptions of what success might look like:

Hired as an assistant professor in a research-intensive university that grants PhDs in political science, a scholar does some CER before winning tenure–along with other research. Publishes some results of the CER along with much other work. Gets tenure on the basis of the publication record.
Someone with a PhD in political science takes those skills to a job in a nongovernmental organization (NGO). She works in research and evaluation, rising ultimately to be the CEO of the organization.
A political scientist in a college located in a smaller community becomes an important convener and civic leader in that community. This person brings public figures to town and organizes community forums. The college comes to value this role.
An experienced social movement activist earns a PhD by studying the movement (studying part-time while continuing to do practical work) and then continues to contribute to the movement as a teacher, scholar, and activist.
A political scientist takes a first job after earning a PhD is in a research lab based in a university that is entirely funded by grants and contracts. One grants leads to another, and this person ends up directing the lab.
A professor has a heavy teaching load in an institution that emphasizes teaching. This instructor incorporates students in applied research projects with the local community. They publish informally, for local audiences.
A scholar’s research agenda is mostly driven by a methodological or theoretical innovation, but they realize they need to do their research with partners. They gain skills in forming and sustaining partnerships.
A political science professor does positivist research by day and social movement activism in the evenings and weekends. There is little connection between these two full-time jobs.
An early-career scholar takes job in a community engagement center in a university and makes a career in that center and in others like it, ending as the vice provost for public engagement.
A graduate student interested in CER cannot find a way to do CER until after tenure, when his early ideas suddenly germinate, and he conducts a CER project.
An academic expert on a social group serves frequently on the boards of relevant organizations, moving from local groups to national and international ones.
A political scientist studies local issues, often in dialogue with local activists. This person runs for political office and leaves academia when elected mayor.

I would offer all of these as successful profiles, although one might argue that some represent structural challenges that individuals have partially overcome through unreasonable amounts of struggle.

Source: Amy Cabrera Rasmussen, Peter Levine, Robert Lieberman, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman & Rogers Smith “Preface,” PS: Political Science & Politics symposium on Civically Engaged Research (2021). See also: civically engaged research in political science.

civically engaged research in political science

Leave a reply

I am at the eighth Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER), a program of the American Political Science Association. Each summer, we gather about 20 political scientists (advanced PhD students, professors, and PhDs working outside academia) for four days of discussions about engaged research, which generally means research conducted in partnership with people or entities that are outside of academia. As we did last year, we are meeting at UCLA in Los Angeles, thanks to the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation and UCLA’s Ralph Bunche Center.

I have been thinking about the standing of this kind of research and how it is viewed by powerful institutions. You could think of the following as a draft of a “power map” for civically engaged research in political science.

To start, we might think that colleges and universities are powerful institutions. On the other hand, many organizations and communities or social groups lack power. A junior scholar who wants to remedy that gap should collaborate with a disadvantaged group in ways that empower it. This requires humility by the scholar. In turn, the university and relevant discipline will probably dislike this style of research because it tends to shift power away. Therefore, the scholar will have to struggle against the university. Finally, the government may support engaged research when progressive are in charge, but when the government is right-wing, it will attack engaged research.

This model is not false, but I would like to complicate it.

All communities have power. Some geographical communities that are poor nevertheless wield considerable power though their elected governments. On the other hand, colleges and universities face significant constraints, economic and otherwise.

Senior faculty in departments that chase prestige may not appreciate engaged research because it may seem methodologically unsophisticated and may not yield generalizable conclusions. On the other hand, the discipline of political science has conferred its highest honors on some scholars whose research depended on partnerships, people like Elinor Ostrom and Jenny Mansbridge (or Ralph Bunche, back in the day). Thanks to the original leadership of Rogers Smith while he was APSA president–sustained by his successors–the Association offers ICER to boost this kind of research.

Also, senior administrators in prestigious universities sometimes prefer engaged research because it is interdisciplinary, it engages students, it attracts philanthropy, and it can improve local relationships.

At this moment, federal funding for political science is endangered, and one would expect the Trump Administration to target civically engaged research. Yet political scientists are involved today in federally funded interdisciplinary engaged research projects, and private philanthropic support may be expanding.

In short, I think the power map is quite complex. My ideal end-state would not be a world in which every political scientist does engaged research. I admire other kinds of research as well. But I would like to see more and better civically engaged research, and moving toward that goal requires navigating a context of both opportunities and risks.

See also: the landscape for civically engaged research (2025; rather similar to these remarks); Civically Engaged Research in Political Science (2023); bootstrapping value commitments (2022)

there will always be an England

Leave a reply

I don’t think most of you are following the multidimensional “Posh George” story as closely as you should.

George Cottrell, 32, is reported to have given substantial but undisclosed gifts to Nigel Farage, the Reform MP for Clacton and the would-be Donald Trump of the UK.

“Posh George” grew up on the private Caribbean island of Mustique (home to about 120 private villas). His mum, the Honourable Fiona Watson, daughter of the 3rd Baron Manton, is a former girlfriend of King Charles, who reportedly nicknamed her “Yum Yum.” George served eight months in a US federal prison for wire fraud. A professional gambler, he has reportedly lost $20 million in a single night.

Farage faces ethical scrutiny for his failure to disclose Posh George’s largess. To neutralize the scandal, Farage is resigning his parliamentary seat, which triggers a by-election in which he will stand. His idea is to return to Westminster triumphantly with the support of the good citizens of Clacton.

The other professional parties are refusing to contest this election. However, Count Binface has declared his intention to run. The Count is an intergalactic space warrior who wears a garbage can (a “dustbin,” in British English) over his head. He was formerly Lord Buckethead but had to change his nom de guerre because of a copyright complaint.

I thought that Count Binface might capture the silly vote and give Farage a run for his money. Unfortunately, the silly bloc may now be split, given the entrance of Rob Pownall, 27, aka “The man in a fox costume.” There is also at least one right-wing candidate who takes himself seriously. We can only hope that silly voters–and those who are silly-adjacent or in solidarity with the silly–will unite behind Count Binface (who, after all, was the first to jump into the ring) and at least embarrass the most embarrassing candidate in the race, the Hon. Nigel.