Queen Mary has released the following press release about our new paper:
Osman, M., Fenton, N. E., Pilditch, T., Lagnado, D. A., & Neil. M. (2018). "Who do we trust on social policy interventions", to appear next week in the journal
Basic and Applied Social Psychology (6/8/18 update: the published paper is here). The preprint of the paper is
here. There are already a number of press reports on it (see below).
People trust scientific experts more than the government even when the evidence is outlandish
Members
of the public in the UK and US have far greater trust in scientific
experts than the government, according to a new study by Queen Mary
University of London.
In three large scale experiments, participants were asked to make
several judgments about nudges -behavioural in
interventions designed to improve decisions in our day-to-day lives.
The nudges were introduced either by a group of
leading scientific experts or a government working group consisting of
special interest groups and policy makers. Some of the nudges were real
and had been implemented, such as using catchy pictures in stairwells to
encourage people to take the stairs, while others were fictitious and
actually implausible like stirring coffee anti-clockwise for two minutes
to avoid any cancerous effects.
The study, published in Basic and Applied Social
Psychology, found that trust was higher for scientists than the
government working group, even when the scientists were proposing
fictitious nudges.
Professor Norman Fenton, from Queen Mary’s School of Electronic
Engineering and Computer Science, said: “While people judged genuine
nudges as more plausible than fictitious nudges, people trusted some
fictitious nudges proposed by scientists as more plausible than genuine
nudges proposed by government. For example, people were more likely
trust the health benefits of coffee stirring than exercise if the former
was recommended by scientists and the latter by government.”
The results also revealed that there was a slight
tendency for the US sample to find the nudges more plausible and more
ethical overall compared to the UK sample.
Lead author Dr Magda Osman from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and
Chemical Sciences, said: “In the context of debates regarding the loss
of trust in experts, what we show is that in actual fact, when compared
to a government working group, the public in the US and UK judge
scientists very favourably, so much so that they show greater levels of
trust even when the interventions that are being proposed are
implausible and most likely ineffective. This means that the public
still have a high degree of trust in experts, in particular, in this
case, social scientists.”
She added: “The evidence suggests that trust in scientists is high, but
that the public are sceptical about nudges in which they might be
manipulated without them knowing. They consider these as less ethical
and trust the experts proposing them less with nudges in which they do
have an idea of what is going on.”
Nudges have become highly popular decision-support
methods used by governments to help in a wide range of areas such as
health, personal finances, and general wellbeing.
The scientific claim is that to help people make better decisions
regarding their lifestyle choices, and those that improve the welfare of
the state, it is potentially effective to subtly change the framing of
the decision-making context, which makes the option which maximises long
term future gains more prominent.
In essence the position adopted by nudge enthusiasts is that poor social
outcomes are often the result of poor decision-making, and in order to
address this, behavioural interventions such as nudges can be used to
reduce the likelihood of poor decisions being made in the first place.
Dr Osman said: “Overall, the public make pretty
sensible judgments, and what this shows is that people will scrutinize
the information they are provided by experts, so long as they are given a
means to do it. In other words, ask the questions in the right way, and
people will show a level of scrutiny that is often not attributed to
them. So, before there are strong claims made about public opinion about
experts, and knee-jerk policy responses to this, it might be worth
being a bit more careful about how the public are surveyed in the first
place.”
Press reports:
- The Daily Record: Stirred by science:
No comments:
Post a Comment