• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, August 29, 2023

I wrote this post some time ago, but given that my home has recently been threatened by wildfire, it might be timely to rerun it. In rereading it, I was struck by the fact that here in British Columbia, Canada, we were warned that this would be one of the hottest, driest summers on record -- yet we seem to have learned few lessons. Official responses still went by the same playbook, our behaviors haven’t changed, and we all seemed surprised by the devastation. At last count, more than 300 homes were lost in my region.

Let’s start with trust in government. Based on a recent study across 22 countries by the OECD, on average only about half the citizens trust their government.

The U.S. wasn’t included in the study. But the PEW Research Center has been tracking trust in government since 1958, so let’s look at that study.

The erosion of trust in the U.S. federal government started with Lyndon Johnson, with trust plummeting further during the Watergate scandal. Interestingly, although separated by ideology, both Republicans and Democrats track similarly when you look at erosion of trust from Nixon through George W. Bush, with the exception being Ronald Reagan. That bipartisanship started to break down with Obama and began to polarize even more with Trump and Biden. Since then trust overall has been increasing, but the overall trend has still been toward lower trust.

Now, let’s look at trust in science. While not as drastic as the decline of trust in government, PEW found that trust in science has also declined, especially in the last few years. Since 2020, the percentage of Americans who have no trust in science had almost doubled, from 12% in April 2020 to 22% in December 2021.

It’s not that the science got worse in those 20 months. It’s that we didn’t want to hear what the science was telling us.

The thing about epistemic trust -- our willingness to believe trustworthy information -- is that it varies depending on what mood we’re in. The higher our stress level, the less likely we are to accept good information at face value, especially if what it’s trying to tell us will only increase our level of stress.

Inputting new information that disrupts our system of beliefs is hard work under any circumstances. It taxes the brain. And if our brain is already overtaxed, it protects itself by locking the doors and windows that new information may sneak through and doubling down on our existing beliefs.

This is what psychologists call confirmation bias.

The only thing that may cause us to question our beliefs is a niggling doubt caused by information that doesn’t fit with our beliefs. But we will go out of our way to find information that does conform to our beliefs so we can ignore the information that doesn’t fit, no matter how trustworthy its source.

The explosion of misinformation that has happened on the internet has made it easier than ever to stick with our beliefs and willfully ignore information that threatens those beliefs.

The other issue in the systemic breakdown of trust may not always be the message -- it might be the messenger. If science is trying to warn us about a threatening Black Swan, that warning is generally going to be delivered in one of two ways, either through a government official or through the media.

And that’s probably where we have our biggest problem. Again, referring to research done by PEW, Americans distrusted journalists almost as much as government. Sixty percent of American Adults had little to no trust in journalists, and a whopping 76% had little to no trust in elected officials.

To go back to my opening line, the good news is science can warn us about Black Swan events and save lives. The bad news is, we have to pay attention to those warnings.

Otherwise, it’s just a boy calling “wolf.”