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[EN VIDÉO] Transmitting science: the doubt of the skeptics When one seeks to transmit the sciences, many questions arise beforehand. But by the way, what are we trying to convey when we talk about the transmission of “the sciences”? Are we talking about the methods that science uses? Data it produces? Of the spirit and approach that scientists must have to exercise it correctly? Or even a critical mind?
People are not irrational. In other words, they do not make a decision without having good reasons. During the Covid-19 pandemic, people opposed to sanitary measures have been characterized in many ways, which in no way allows us to understand what drives them to reject sanitary measures.
In political science research on the links between the perception of transparency of government, trust in government and adherence to fake news, few empirical results are available to weave a clear web of associations between these different parameters. Yet they are often taken for granted.
Canadian and Scottish researchers wanted to test the commonly accepted hypotheses in this field of research. They reveal that adherence to fake news alters the perception of government transparency, that the level of adherence to fake news partly determines how this perception changes over time, and that people who adhere to this fake news use it to rationalize their perception of government.
Fake news and the perception of transparency
To assess this link, the researchers compared the average degree of support for six fake news stories about the pandemic and the surveyed cohort’s perception of their government’s transparency. The more a person buys into fake news, the worse their perception of government transparency seems to be. The authors compared the effect of adherence to fake news to other variables such as political ideology, trust in the scientific community or the way of consuming information (social networks, newspapers, etc.). No variable has such a strong effect as buy-in to fake news.
Their results also suggest that there may be a threshold in matter acceptance of fake news and the evolution of the perception of transparency. Indeed, the authors measured changes in the perception of transparency over time. People adhering to three or more fake news testify to a fixed perception over time while below this threshold, this perception seems to evolve favorably.
The importance of the political climate
An interesting piece of the investigation is the fact that people who buy into fake news often use it to justify their perception of the government. The authors state that they have not determined the direction of the link between fake news and the perception of transparency. From our perception, it is probably a two-way link where the climate politics is the common denominator. It should be remembered that in absolute value, people adhering to fake news are relatively few in number and this study confirms this again (up to 60% of the cohort does not adhere to any fake news offered) and that it seems urgent to improve study the people who make up this group, homogeneous in terms of adherence to fake news but probably heterogeneous in other respects.
Indeed, as we mentioned in previous articles, more than support for fake news, it is a generalized skepticism towards the reliability of the government and the media that affects a large part of the population. It’s about putting all our energy in what is most likely to produce the most harmful consequences. From this point of view, improving the communication of information providers and creating a socio-political environment that strengthens the political interest of the population seem to be the primary objectives to be achieved. Because, if fake news is bad reason to infer the degree of transparency in government, this same degree of transparency is far from optimal as we have been able to observe throughout this pandemic.
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