What we miss when we measure public understanding of science

Science communication professionals had a secret desire: to know what people really think and know about science. In the academic literature, there is an abundance of data on trust in science and science literacy. And still the answers are not completely satisfactory.

A comment published in Nature suggests the problem lies in how we measure trust in science and science literacy. For decades, research has relied on surveys that reduce public attitudes to knowledge and confidence. These tools are useful, but they offer only a partial view.

Science as a social system

Scientific literacy is often assessed through factual questions, while trust is condensed into simple indicators. But knowing facts says little about how people evaluate expertise, and expressing trust does not mean agreeing with how science is governed or applied. By isolating knowledge and trust from their context, these measures miss how science is actually experienced—within controversies, institutions and everyday life.

The Nature article proposes a shift: to see science not just as a body of knowledge, but as a social and institutional enterprise. Public understanding, in this sense, also involves expectations about how science should work and judgments about whether it lives up to those expectations. This perspective brings into focus issues such as transparency, independence, and the handling of uncertainty—dimensions that often drive public debate but remain underexplored in research and that emerged largely during the research for the ENJOI project.

Understanding how science works: a broader approach

An important gap concerns how people interpret the dynamics of scientific knowledge itself, and how much they know about it. Evidence changes, results are revised, and consensus evolves through time. For some people, this is a sign of robustness; for others, it appears as inconsistency, a sign of the weakness of scientific knowledge. Capturing this distinction is crucial, especially in a media environment where new findings circulate quickly and often without context.

The ultimate call is for a broader approach: one that equips people to evaluate science rather than simply trust it. This means paying attention to the norms, practices and institutional structures that sustain credibility. For journalism, this implies a shift from reporting results to explaining how science works—and why it is sometimes contested.

Read the full article on Nature: Why we don’t really know what the public thinks about science