Photo by The Kingsway School, Flickr CC
Photo by The Kingsway School, Flickr CC

From climate change to stem cell research, public discourse in the United States is highly divided about the legitimacy and authority of science. Depending on your views, it’s easy to dismiss the other side as uninformed or uneducated, but sociologists know that views about science are more complicated than that.

Despite common misconceptions that climate change skepticism is linked to education, trust in science has only a small correlation with educational attainment or scientific literacy.
Rather, distrust of science is closely linked to political and religious affiliations. Conservatives have the lowest level of trust in science; this holds true even among highly educated conservatives. As for religious folks, studies find that it is not necessarily that religious people completely distrust the scientific method, but rather they reject science’s influence on issues they see as a moral concern.
However, research cautions against thinking about trust in science as simply a liberal versus conservative binary. A recent study offers a more complicated analysis, arguing that a third perspective defies this binary. This group, labeled “postseculars,” have more complicated views — they often trust science in certain domains, but distrust it in others, reflecting a much more complicated picture of how cleavages in social, political, and economic attitudes influence public opinion of scientific authority.