Spring 2025 Colloquium Series

Trust in the scientific community is vital for the implementation of evidence-based public policies. Nonetheless, public trust in scientists has waned since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Political ideology is a dominant predictor of differences in trust in the scientific community, with political conservatives more likely to report distrust than their liberal or moderate counterparts. What are the mechanisms through which political conservatism might translate into distrust in scientists? We draw from theories on symbolic boundaries and social cognition to lay the groundwork for one such cultural-psychological mechanism: a reliance on immoral reasoning about scientists. Using nationally-representative survey data and a combination of natural language processing and structural equation models, we find immoral reasoning partially mediates the relationship between political ideology and trust in scientists.