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What do the London Science Museum, New World Symphony, and the National Park Service have in common? They are all fighting for relevance in an often indifferent world.

The Art of Relevance explores how mission-driven organizations can matter more to more people. The book is packed with dozens of inspiring examples, rags-to-relevance case studies, research-based frameworks, and practical advice on how your work can be more vital to your community.

The Art of Relevance was written by best-selling author Nina Simon, rooted in her experience as a museum director and activist for more open, inclusive, effective cultural institutions.

You can read the book for free online here, or purchase it as a paperback, ebook, or audiobook. Here's Nina sharing some of the key points from the book in her 2016 TEDx talk.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NINA SIMON has been described as a "museum visionary" by Smithsonian Magazine for her community-centered approach to design. She is the Spacemaker and CEO of OF/BY/FOR ALL, a movement to build more inclusive community organizations. From 2011-2019, she was the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, leading a dramatic institutional turnaround. She has consulted with hundreds of international museums, libraries, parks, historic sites, art and cultural centers on issues of relevance, community engagement, and participatory design. Nina is the best-selling author of The Participatory Museum and the popular Museum 2.0 blog. Her work has been shared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR, and TEDx. She lives off the grid in the Santa Cruz mountains with nineteen people, twenty-seven chickens, three dogs, and one zipline.
THANK YOU
Special thanks to the James Irvine Foundation for financial support of this project, Elise Granata for her incredible design work, and Jon Moscone for writing a powerful preface.

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The Art of Relevance - a new book by Nina Simon

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The Art of Relevance explores how mission-driven organizations can matter more to more people. The book is packed with inspiring examples, rags-to-relevance case studies, research-based frameworks, and practical advice on how your work can be more vital to your community.

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Science and Technology: Public Perceptions, Awareness, and Information Sources

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Public perceptions of science and technology in the United States affect many aspects of civic life. This report provides insights into public confidence in science, understanding of scientific research principles, and Americans' engagement with science through media, scientific activities, or children's science activities.

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A book (of many) by JMLL about Science and culture

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A book (of many) by JMLL about Science and culture

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What is Citizen Science?

Citizen science actively involves the public in scientific research that generates new knowledge or understanding, and thus has the potential to bring together science, policy makers, and society as a whole in an impactful way. As a core dimension of Open Science, it opens up the opportunity for all members of society to take an active role in research, innovation and the development of evidence-based policy, at local, national and EU levels. Citizen scientists can participate in many stages of the scientific process, from data collection and volunteer mapping, through data interpretation and analysis, to publication and dissemination of results.

Citizen science is a flexible concept which can be adapted and applied within diverse situations and disciplines, and represents a range of approaches and historical practices for public participation in scientific research. As a result, there are a wide range of activities that can fall under the umbrella of citizen science, as can be seen in the ECSA Characteristics of Citizen Science. A good source of guidance when planning a citizen science initiative is the ECSA 10 Principles of Citizen Science. They have been translated to 30 languages by the citizen science community!

Our community is open to anyone interested in citizen science - our vision for the platform is to encourage the democratization of science via the wide establishment and appreciation of citizen science approaches across Europe.

We hope to become the central reference point for anyone setting up or running a citizen science project (practitioners, researchers, educators, communities and citizens), anyone supporting the ecosystem of citizen science projects (policy makers and funding bodies), and anyone interested in the outcomes and impact of citizen science (decision makers, the press, and society as a whole). It doesn't matter if you have years of experience or are completely new to citizen science.

On the platform you can browse and search for resources that are useful for planning and running citizen science projects, training resources and materials about the practice of citizen science, and citizen science projects to learn from the experience of others and collaborate. There is a section with training modules or MOOCS on citizen science from introduction to citizen science over research design and methods to engagement, impact and communication. There are also an events calendar and a blog, profiles of organisations and platforms involved in citizen science projects and research, community forums for questions and conversations with the community.

No, we don't host any documents, files, or software on our platform. When a profile is created for a resource, it points to the location where that resource is stored or published, and project profiles point to the external website of that project. We strongly recommend the use of permanent repositories (such as the publisher's page, Zenodo, OSF or the RIO Journal) to create permalinks and digital object identifiers (DOI) for all resources.

Yes, we actively encourage all members of the community to create a profile for their organisations, citizen science projects and resources on the platform. To create a profile, you will first need to sign up and log in to the platform and then select the appropriate form via the +Add button in the top right-hand corner.

The projects profiled must involve participants in a way that can genuinely be considered citizen science. For guidance, please refer to ECSA's Characteristics of Citizen Science. The projects can be short-term or long-term initiatives or projects without an end date. Citizen science projects can involve voluntary participants (citizen scientists) in many fields of research and in many stages of the research process - from data collection and volunteer mapping, through data interpretation and analysis, to publication and dissemination of results. Additionally, projects profiled on the platform should engage as much as possible with the ECSA 10 Principles of Citizen Science.

Once you have signed up and are logged in, look for the +Add button in the top right-hand corner of the website. There you can select the profile form that you wish to complete. We recommend that you first create a profile for your organisation, so that it can be linked to your projects and resources. In this form you will be asked to provide descriptive information in a number of mandatory and optional data fields. This information will be used for creating the public profile of the project or resource on our platform. Please note that resources are not uploaded to the platform, rather they are linked to from within the profile that you create.

Please note that you will be required to describe the citizen science aspects of your project, and the way in which your resource relates to the practice of citizen science. When saved, the profile will be submitted to a member of the EU-Citizen.Science team for moderation. Once that process is complete, the profile will be marked as 'Moderated', and will be fully available on the platform.

How does moderation work?

When a profile is saved, it will be submitted for moderation to the platform moderator, and marked as 'not yet moderated' on the platform. The first criterion that the moderator will look for, is that you have described the citizen science aspects of your project, or described the way in which your resource is relevant to citizen science. Guidance for this can be found in ECSA's Characteristics of Citizen Science developed by the citizen science community. The moderator will also consider whether your resource or project is in alignment with the ECSA 10 Principles of Citizen Science.

Resources will be assessed further against a range of specific criteria to ensure that they are easy to access, implement and adapt, well structured, clearly described and written in clear language, and ideally improve or support the desired impact of the initiative (e.g. on science, policy or society, etc.). You can read the full list of quality criteria.

The same overarching criteria are applied to both projects and resources. You are required to provide descriptive information in a number of data fields in the project profile, some of which are mandatory, before it can be submitted for moderation. One of these mandatory fields is a description of the citizen science aspects of the project. Guidance for this can be found in ECSA's Characteristics of Citizen Science. A further suggested overarching criteria for projects is that they be in alignment with the ECSA 10 Principles of Citizen Science.

Yes, you can edit and update the profiles of the projects, resources, and organisations that you have shared, both before and after they have been moderated. You can find these profile edit pages in your Personal Area.

What is the Personal Area?

When you are logged in, you will see a 'bookmark' button at the bottom of project and (training) resource profiles. This allows you to add the profiles that you are interested in to a list that can be found in your Personal Area under My bookmarks, allowing you to find this content again easily.

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What is Citizen Science? Citizen science actively involves the public in scientific research that generates new knowledge or understanding, and thus has the potential to bring together science, policy makers, and society as a whole in an impactful way.

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TRACES article about public participation in science engagement

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TRACES article about public participation in science engagement

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1 Introduction

At PCST 2020+1 we presented a paper exploring the points of contact and the points of divergence between science engagement activities, and emergent co-creation and participation practices. These reflections were based on the observation of increasing interest from the science engagement community for the world of participation and co-creation (in particular through the inclusion of participatory spaces within science centers, or in the activities of public engagement associations), and vice-versa (mainly motivated by the need of ensuring that participatory activities are visible, recognizable, and accessible to the wider public).

In fact, more and more science centers are integrating fab-lab spaces and living lab approaches in their offer; science engagement activities are including citizen science and participatory research components; hybrid cultural spaces are multiplying, working in the grey zone between knowledge production and knowledge sharing; discussion games are often used to explore or even influence policy making around controversial socio-technical issues; design thinking and co-creation are becoming an expertise valued to develop science communication actions [Deserti, Real and Schmittinger, 2022 ].

This convergence/hybridization is a wonderful opportunity of renewal for science communication practices. Association Traces is trying to harness it by experimenting various types of hybridization of co-creation, participation, social inclusion and traditional science communication activities. These range from extremely light approaches injecting participation elements into traditional formats, down to full scale co-creation and living lab formats truly combining the interests of research and the interests of the various engaged audiences.

We present below a brief overview of some of these experiences. Rather than focusing on one single example, we chose to span several examples. For each one, we highlight the added value of promoting participation and of taking into consideration visitor knowledge in science communication activities. Specific references describing each example in full detail are included in the paragraphs below. We would like to defend these hybridizations as a key component in making science communication relevant for a wider range of audience on the one hand, and on the other hand in renewing the role of science communication within the process of scientific knowledge production. In other words, we conclude that more participation within science communication, if well done, will result in a healthier and more just society, and lead at the same time to better science (i.e., original, robust, relevant, ethical). Although they all wish to do so, none of our examples fully satisfy both these ambitions: they will be presented here as ongoing experiences providing partial contributions, indicating that a more mature interpretation of participatory science communication is needed in order to fully progress toward this double goal.

In the concluding section, we present some general reflections on specific features of participatory activities and science communication highlighted by the examples, and we focus on how, in order for the hybridization of the two approaches to occur, it is important to design activities that welcome different level of engagement, that is, welcoming the participation of fully committed citizen willing to invest time and energy, as well as the lighter participation of curious, "passing-by" visitors.

Traces is a Paris based association focusing on science and society issues. Its mission is "to transform scientific culture into a tool for social justice and citizen participation". Traces activities consist, on the one hand, in offering opportunities to wider segments of society to meet and use knowledge as an instrument of change, and on the other hand in offering opportunities to the scientific community to discover and take advantage of the richness of the diverse knowledge available in society.

2 Participation, inclusion, and relevance for research

Participation should not be considered as a goal in itself. In the activities presented in the following sections, participation is instrumental for two key objectives that we wish to achieve. First, a socially-inclusive knowledge society, able to offer opportunities to all the segments of society to use knowledge (and scientific knowledge in particular) as a power-tool for change [Merzagora, Mignan and Rodari, 2015 ]. Second, a role for science communication and public engagement as a productive opportunity for scientific research, that is, offering opportunities to scientific research to progress in more original and socially relevant directions [Merzagora, 2016 ; Merzagora, 2017 ].

In both these objectives, and regardless of the great variety of participatory approaches, one key concept remains, in our view, at the core: public engagement and science communication should always value the knowledge of the public more than their ignorance. In fact, participatory science communication challenges a traditional, widespread, yet absurd posture: inviting the public only for what they do not know, and inviting scientists only for what they know [Merzagora, 2016 ]. In this sense, participatory science communication is key to progress toward socially-inclusive science communication [Massarani and Merzagora, 2014 ; Merzagora, Mignan and Rodari, 2015 ; Aguirre, 2016 ]: in fact, it is impossible to propose socially-inclusive public engagement activities without ensuring a full recognition of the relevance of the knowledge of each participant. And participatory science communication is also key to a scientifically productive science communication , by ensuring that in public engagement activities scientists also always have something to learn and the public has always something to offer too. We consider that participatory science communication is relevant when it leads to socially-inclusive and scientifically-productive science communication.

In the following, we will shortly review some examples in which we tested various ways to value the knowledge of the public in science engagement activities.

3 Injecting participation into traditional formats

During traditional activities, such as presentations involving scientists talking about their research in front of an audience, some extremely simple techniques allow to ensure contributions by the public. As a general rule, we ensure that in the first phases of the encounter, the scientist should never be the first one to talk. The audience should talk first, and scientists should be allowed to actively listen. We experimented many "tricks" to allow this: a most simple one is to ask the audience to associate keywords to the title of the presentation before listening to it, draw a word-cloud, and ask the scientist to start his or her talk by reacting to it, making particularly explicit the elements of surprise (there are always some). A most fun one, designed by our partners in the European Researchers Night French consortium, features a "chinese whispers" game among visitors, starting from a scientific sentence, letting the message "deteriorate" along the chain of transmission from one person to the other, and then asking the scientists to build their presentation based on the final restitution (for once, the game itself is guilty of the deterioration, not the media! ). We proposed similar approaches by having the scientists and the public comment on improvised theatre shows about the topic of the presentation, etc.

While these examples cannot be defined as "participatory", they do strongly influence the posture of both the audience and the scientists toward a participatory posture. The key elements are the order of the speakers, and the fact that the contribution of the audience is bound to perturbate and influence the presentation. In fact, preparing the scientist to give a talk in which they will be asked to actively listen and say nothing for the first 20% of the time, is already strongly influencing their mindset. Similarly, asking the public to propose open ended reflections before the presentation, thus acknowledging that they have a lot of valuable contributions to give, changes their listening attitude. These "tricks" enable to reveal differences and peculiarities among an otherwise undifferentiated audience: by proposing keywords, deformations, cultural references, images, etc., each participant reveals something of his or her viewpoints, expertise, knowledge, which then becomes valued and can be part of the communication event.

A clear advantage of such simple actions is that the proposition remains clearly recognizable and accessible by the common, less experienced audiences, an audience that most probably would not invest the time and the energy needed to participate in a living lab or a scenario workshop in its first contact point.

4 GEP: a large-scale participatory experiment within a science communication event

The Grande Experience Participative (GEP, 'large participatory experiment') is an initiative that had been running every 2 years since 2015 within the European Researchers Night (ERN) in France, where a research group develops a large-scale experiment involving the participation of 10.000+ citizens on a single night in 12 to 14 French cities.

The initiative starts with a classical call for proposals, asking research groups to submit proposals for an experiment that takes advantage of the participation of several thousand citizens on a single night during ERN. A jury composed of researchers and science communication experts selects one single proposal according to both scientific and public engagement criteria: the research should lead to valuable scientific results, and at the same time be able to engage the audience during the participatory phases. The selected experiment receives funding (that for once goes from a communication activity to a scientific project, rather than the opposite) and the support of local ERN organizers in order to design and facilitate citizen participation in the experimental protocol. All the phases of selection and funding, design of the experiment, execution of the experiment, data analysis down to the publication of results, lasting between 10 and 20 months, are documented through a blog, so the public can have an overview of the entire parabola of a research project.

The 2015 experiment was designed and performed by a team of researchers in behavioral economics led by Angela Sutan, LESSAC, Dijon-Bourgogne, that designed an experiment to study the different attitudes of the audience toward common goods in an environment characterized by non-renewable resources [details in Lohéac et al., 2017 ]. The 2017 experiment, led by Hugo Mercier at ENS Paris and Jean Nicod Institute, explored the circulation of ideas in large groups by proposing different tasks to the audience gathered in large lecture rooms, and measuring how different answers propagated in the room with respect to a given set of parameters controlling the communication among participants [details in Claidière and Mercier, 2021 ]. In 2019, based on an original idea of Thierry Brassac, a research team from Montpellier University proposed a participatory research in developmental psychology on the comforting power of objects, asking all the ERN audience to bring, measure and discuss their favorite childhood teddy bear, and upload their results on a collaborative website. Researchers then used this data to explore correlation between quantitative measurements and qualitative and narrative descriptions collected by the visitors themselves during the event through a combination of on-site and on-line data-collection devices. In all cases, the public of ERN was invited to participate in group activities, following a carefully designed protocol to provide robust data, exploitable for research purposes. In all cases, by actively participating in the research effort, the public was strongly engaged and eager to learn details of the research activity. In other words, all GEP experiments consisted in engaging activities, leading to enriching dialogues between scientists and the public and high-quality learning outcomes, but also led to a concrete progress of research and to the publication of at least one scientific paper in peer reviewed journals in each case.

By combining a major communication activity and a research activity within the same event, the GEP makes participation driven by science a wonderful opportunity for public engagement, and reshuffles the traditional relationship between scientific production and dissemination: the dissemination action is the driver and the funder of research, rather than the opposite. Overall, the GEP creates a single, large-scale event that is at the same time a research and a communication activity, in which the interests of researchers (collecting valuable data for publications) and of the public (learning, discussing, dialoguing about a research project) converge.

5 Exhibitions as platforms for participation

Exhibitions are an easily recognizable communication device, accessible, particularly welcomed by school groups and curiosity-driven audiences. At Traces, we researched ways to transform exhibitions (a display of acquired knowledge) into explorations (a tool to investigate open questions and eventually produce original knowledge), by making them platforms for participation [Bron, Leroy and Merzagora, 2018 ]. We report here three examples.

5.1 Science, a history of humor

La science, une histoire d'humour was an exhibition that grew (literally) in 2012-2013 at Espace des Sciences Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, the science culture venue of ESPCI Paris and PSL University in Paris, managed by Association Traces. The exhibition pushed the idea of a crowd-sourced, evolutionary exhibition to the extreme. It started completely empty, with a call for participation inviting scientists and general audience to take their favourite science jokes from their lab doors, their power-points, their comic books, etc. and share them in the exhibition spaces. On the exhibition site, a system of scanners, printers, blackboards, magnetic boards allowed the public to add their jokes to the displays. An on-line connected printer allowed the public that had nothing to propose to print and expose a joke sent remotely by other members of the public unable to visit the exhibition. After a first kick-off event involving mainly scientists, but also television stars, policy makers, writers, artists, all coming with their jokes, the exhibition kept growing throughout its 7 months of opening, and through a series of thematic events. During the whole period, the visitors/producers were invited to "come with their jokes" and add them to the display. During the events, they kept bringing in original content from their homes, labs, memories, or rearranging the existing content on site in different ways: for example, by nominating the less understandable jokes, by rearranging all the jokes on display according to the scientific disciplines (all items were displayed on movable, magnetic supports), by adding comments on jokes about sexism or research funding (by far the most represented topic), or by adding sexually explicit drawings in the science centre toilets, as not all of the content could be showed in the exhibition spaces. The exhibition ended empty, after a last event in which visitors were asked to "dismantle" it, and all of the content went back to the homes, labs, memories of other users.

In terms of content, the exhibition presented how science reflects on itself, and how society reflects on science through humour and parody. By looking at jokes, caricatures and parodies, in newspapers, movies or TV series, as well as at comics hanging on the labs doors wall or included in scientists' power-point presentations, visitors could - after having some good time - reflect on how science and scientists live and work, humour and private jokes providing very rich insights about a community. This participatory approach allowed to produce a 100% crowdsourced exhibition and a platform of exchange on visions of science through the lens of humour. The whole content was selected and displayed by the visitors, and in particular by scientists amused by the principle and willing to expose their jokes and reflect on them. The same content selected by a curator would certainly have resulted in a more coherent and polished exhibition, but it would have placed a clear dividing line between the interest of scientists and the interest of the public, and it would have induced a more passive posture in the visitors.

5.2 Frugal science

Science Frugale was a forum-exhibition presented in 2017 in the same venue. The exhibition wanted to explore how to do low-cost experimental scientific research by hacking various available technologies (for example, an old CD ROM player found in the waste bin can be transformed in a fully performing microscope, using optical components, lasers, but also high precision mechanical parts...), at the crossroads between experimental scientific research, maker culture, and cooperation with developing countries. It was a small, low-cost project developed by Traces in collaboration with "Physique sans Frontières", a group of the French Physics Society and PSL University, with the support of the Ile-de-France Region. It involved a small group of highly committed exhibition professionals (Nathan Morel, Colette Pitois alias @Colpizen, Studio Millimètre) a very long list of contributors (experimental scientists, app developers, radical feminists, Arduino geeks, engineering students, FabLab enthusiasts, creative teachers, engaged artists, etc.), and a lot of work done by the visitors themselves.

The exhibition was a work in progress, constantly changing over time, in which the majority of the objects on display (frugal scientific instruments) were actually built by the visitors themselves in a series of workshops, tailored to the needs of specific audiences or designed in order to cross knowledge among the different profiles listed above. The process of exploring the topic, finding new ideas, and actually building the objects to be put on display was all done in collaboration with the audiences. The exhibition was awarded the Mariano Gago - ECSITE award 2017 for its participatory approach. Following this recognition, an in-depth paper was published in the Spokes magazine, describing the details of the project, its value for the different audiences, as well as its shortcomings [Bron, Leroy and Merzagora, 2018 ].

5.3 The science of choice

Sous influence - la science du choix ran throughout 2019 at ESPGG. In connection with the EU funded project Siscode it explored how an exhibition can be used as a tool for co-creation. The science of choice investigated how current advancement in cognitive neurosciences and the increasingly ubiquitous presence of algorithmic decision making in our personal or professional life impact the notion of choice and the meaning of the term "choice". This open question was posed to scientists and many other groups, including the lay public: in fact, the exhibition was designed as a platform through which different groups and different forms of expertise (scientists, technicians, commercials, designers, science communicators, teachers, AI experts, ...) could meet and explore the notion of choice in the contemporary world. In this case, a participatory exhibition became something more than a device to display scientific knowledge with a contribution from the visitors: it became an enabler of co-creation events (by providing a stable context and container for the events) and a support to document them (by providing a visible space to the outcomes of the events, in the form of pictures, drawing, schemes or performances generated during the events). More details on one of these explorations, about algorithms as spectator of culture, can be found in Merzagora et al. [ 2021 ] and Merzagora, Ghilbert and Meunier [ 2022 ].

These three examples show, within the limit of small-scale actions, various ways in which an exhibition can contribute to, or be the product of, participatory science communication. In fact, on one hand these exhibitions were conceived and/or built by visitors, thus being the product of a participation process. On the other hand, exhibitions were thought of as instruments to promote participation, both in order to foster participation culture, and to use participation to explore elusive corners of science and knowledge: whether to exchange humor and jokes, to become environmentally and socially-aware makers of scientific instruments, or to discuss the future of choice (clearly a scientific as much as a citizen question), scientists and the public were not assigned separate seats, but they all gained from a common platform.

6 E-Fabrik', digital engagement for social link

The key idea and concept of the E-FABRIK' project is bringing together disabled people and young adults in NEET (Neither in Employment, Education or Training) to develop, design and build concrete solutions and prototypes which respond to the everyday needs of disabled people, using digital fabrication tools and digital resources of their neighborhood in a collaborative design process. Guided by Traces' facilitators, following a detailed protocol lasting from a few weeks to a few months, young people and disabled persons meet, get to know each other, identify a problem of the disabled person, learn how to use Fablabs and digital tools, prototype, test and finalize a solution to the problem, and eventually celebrate their achievement. The "solution" might be very simple, such as a 3D-printed handle that enabled one participant with mobility problems to become autonomous in taking a shower, or a tailored timer for one participant that had problems in managing daily routines. The process leading to the solution, on the other hand, is always extremely rich on the human and social side, and generates a strong appetite and motivation for STEAM learning in the young people in NEET. Situated at the interface between digital, social and professional inclusion of disadvantaged young people, the project has five main objectives: 1) Bringing together young people and people with disabilities in a creative community; 2) Designing and building concrete and open-source solutions regarding the everyday needs of people with disabilities; 3) Creating long-lasting partnerships between organisations from different fields: disability, youth and digital creativity like fablabs and makerspaces; 4) Seizing new technologies through active solidarity and becoming an actor in its territory; 5) For NEET participants, discovering a motivation for technology learning, learning how to use new digital tools and developing new competencies. In 5 years, more than 200 highly documented prototypes were realized collaboratively (see the full description at www.efabrik.fr ), but more importantly, hundreds of people experienced a highly rewarding experience of STEAM learning, the creation of social links, a solution to practical pressing problem, and an active contribution to social and technological innovation [Martineau, 2021 ].

E-Fabrik' is entirely a co-creation project, in which the objectives of science education, social link, solutions of practical problems and multi sectorial dialogue are all met at the same time. E-Fabrik' is not, strictly speaking, a science communication project: but one component, young people far from school and employment, discover and learn a lot about digital technology and its importance in contemporary society. And it is not, strictly speaking, a participatory process: but all the process is entirely user led, and participation is at the core of the outcome. In our view the features outlined above do correspond, if taken all together, to a good definition of participatory science communication.

7 Raconte-moi tes technologies : intergenerational dialogue as a way to recognize the value of each participant's sociotechnical knowledge

In the intergenerational dialogue project "Tell me about your technologies" elderly people and children discuss, through a facilitated activity, about their personal knowledge of technologies such as a typewriter, a floppy disk or a vocal AI based assistant. Activities take places in homes for the elderly, in elementary school, in flea markets, in public libraries, and revolve about a set of physical objects that can be manipulated... At the core of the exchanges is the discovery by each of the participants that: they hold an amazingly rich and diverse knowledge about the world around them, regardless of the level of social recognition society gives it; their knowledge is relevant for other people, and most notably for people from other generations; and that exchanging this knowledge is enriching both emotionally and intellectually [Martineau, Mignan and Merzagora, 2014 ].

In doing so, the project is emblematic of Traces' approach of setting up science communication activities starting from people's knowledge, rather than from their ignorance. Once again, although neither science communication nor participation are the core of the initiatives, the combination of the two - learning about old and new technologies through collecting and valuing the knowledge of other participants about them - becomes a true source of participation. People are, at the same time, the source and the recipient of knowledge exchanges, and without their contribution the activity would simply not exist. As a result, they recognize themselves as valuable and respectable sources of knowledge: a very precious form of empowerment in our view.

8 QSEC - when scientific questions become citizen challenges, and vice versa.

The participatory project "QSEC - questions des sciences, enjeux citoyens" (science questions, citizens' issues) explored many different ways of embedding citizens' contributions in the design, implementation, and life of a participatory travelling exhibition, funded by the Île-de-France Region in order to bring public engagement with science in remote areas of the Parisian region [de Sousa and Garraud, 2019 ]. Two exhibitions, one about "Air", the second about mobilities ("trajectoires"), were produced by a group of 8 civil society organizations together with professional exhibition developers and groups of concerned citizens. Within a previously designed general framework, citizens were participating by developing specific aspects of the exhibition. In some cases, they provided ideas for new concepts to be developed; in other cases, they practically designed an exhibition element; in other cases, they organized local events; and in other cases, they contributed to all of the above. For the case of Trajectoires , the exhibition about mobility, this ranged from providing a full history of the urban change of a neighborhood due to mobility policies, to collecting examples of "travelling words" thanks to the multicultural nature of the group, to the inclusion in the exhibition of self-produced videos allowing to treat issues such as migration history, or mobility for the disabled through dance-contact approach.

Participation was at the core of the production phases, as well as of the events during the exhibition life. The evaluation of the project showed a clear impact on most visitors: about 2/3 of them found a very relevant added value in knowing that some of the exhibits were actually co-created by groups of citizens and other visitors. The awareness of participation as a key element of the exhibition production triggered a high level of "quick" contributions to the exhibition by the standard visitors, such as post-it comments and reactions, adding elements to open exhibits, etc. Our interpretation of this is that participation triggers participation: the more you notice that a communication product went through co-creation or a participation process, the more you are willing to adopt a participative and engaged posture. This observation reinforces the idea that participation, in order to be effective, should always be made visible.

In a full-scale participation process (say, consensus conferences such as the 2019 French Consultation citoyenne pour le climat ) it is essential to ensure that the consequences of participation, such as the implementation of a decision, are respectful of the initial contract. However, this engagement is not always possible in all situations. One way out is to renounce participation, unless a strong commitment to respect all decisions can be promised. The alternative approach described here is to lower the expectations (and be honest about them), make participation meaningful at some level, however simple, make participation visible, and ensure that all levels of participation, from the deeply committed person to the post-it scribbler, are valued and respected.

9 Participation vs. communication?

Participatory science communication, and more generally the convergence between participation and co-creation culture and science communication/public engagement culture, respond to many different objectives. Some of these are truly convergent, such as aiming at knowledge as a source of empowerment. Others are not, and we believe it is important to gain awareness precisely on these aspects.

In the PCST 2020+1 presentation we proposed some basic analysis comparing the characteristics of cultural activities and co-creation activities in the field of Responsible Research and Innovation. The table below (Table 1 ) shows a summary of some of the key differences we highlighted.

For example, co-creation and participation need to ensure a productive outcome and measurable consequences (a co-designed product or prototype, a change in a policy, an improvement in the community), which is not the case for cultural or science engagement actions, that do generate change, but do not in general have or wish to have control on it. On the other side, cultural activities and communication need to ensure a high level of accessibility, offering the possibility to be reached by everyone wishing to, which includes the concerned audiences but also the curious, the superficially interested, or even the uninterested skeptics that wish to expose themselves lightly without endorsing the value of the knowledge presented to them: in general, the latter category is hardly integrated in participatory activities, where there is a need to privilege participants directly concerned or with a desire to contribute to the issue at stake.

The examples and the associated reflections outlined above are intended to show that in order to take advantage of this hybridization, we need to develop a clear understanding of the specific features of participation and science engagement practices, and then develop a case by case approach, carefully reflecting on the need of each participant and finding ways to make the contribution of each one relevant for all.

10 Concluding remarks

The fertile convergence leading to participatory science communication described in the introduction is not mandatory, on the contrary: purely top down science communication activities are of great value and they respond to a true societal demand; purely innovation-oriented participatory activities, in which only selected people can participate in order to maximize the efficiency of the process and the quality of the outcome, are also of great value. But they are just a part of the story.

What we tried to extract from the examples above is how the specific, interesting features that we can observe in each spot of the continuum from science communication to participatory practices can become a learning opportunity for other spots in the same continuum.

Observing the participation world has allowed us to increase reflexivity and reveal hidden contradictions. For example, in addition to what is already outlined in the examples above, the implicit, utterly wrong assumptions that if you want to be more inclusive you should "reach more people" (that is, de facto , multiplying spectators at the expense of actors), or "meet them where they are" (that is, conquer and occupy spaces and time slots where "they" choose what to do - take a metro, go to a shopping mall, watch a soap opera - with contents they did not choose: an ill-conceived, almost colonialist idea!), or "make science fun" (that is, focusing on constructing an advertising image of science, rather than raising awareness about it). Recent works [Simon, 2016 ; Dawson, 2019 ; Perronet, 2018 ; Simon, 2010 ] clearly show that this is a dead-end choice, and that the actual efforts should be directed toward ensuring and enhancing relevance, and an autonomous use of acquired knowledge by the people or the communities engaged.

As stated in the introduction, in our case the main core concept that science communication has gained from the participatory world is to value people's knowledge more than people's ignorance, to never let the "lay public" concept conceal the richness of diversities, and to master this richness without oversimplifying it, recognizing for example that valuing all types of knowledge does not mean that all types of knowledge are equivalent.

Acknowledgments

Actions and reflections of Traces are always a collective work, involving the whole team and several external participants. It is impossible to quote and thank all the contributors that would deserve it. For the specific insights and experiences presented in this paper, we are particularly indebted to our former colleagues Sandrine Bron, Meriem Fresson, Axelle Hubert, Vanessa Mignan, Claire Potier.

Siscode project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement No 788217; European Researchers Night has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement N101036048 and previous grants, from the French Ministry of Research, and the French Ministry of Culture. QSEC2 and The science of choice received funding from the Île-de-France Region, programme "La science pour tous". ESPGG projects were supported by ESPCI Paris, PSL University and the Town of Paris (programme "culture scientifique"). We are grateful to the many foundations and institutions supporting the E-Fabrik' project, too numerous to be cited here.

References

Claidière, N. and Mercier, H. (2021). 'Does discussion make crowds any wiser'. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/CFWV2 .

Dawson, E. (2019). Equity, exclusion and everyday science learning: the experiences of minoritised groups. Abingdon, Oxon, U.K.: Routledge.

Deserti, A., Real, M. and Schmittinger, F., eds. (2022). Co-creation for Responsible Research and Innovation. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78733-2 .

Martineau, C., Mignan, V. and Merzagora, M. (2014). 'Raconte-moi tes technologies: science communication to foster intergenerational dialogue'. In: 13th International Public Communication of Science and Technology Conference (Salvador, Brazil, 5th-8th May 2014). URL: https://pcst.co/archive/paper/1926 .

Merzagora, M., Ghilbert, A. and Meunier, A. (2022). 'TRACES - In 2030, Artificial Intelligences Will Visit Museums?' In: Co-creation for Responsible Research and Innovation. Ed. by A. Deserti, M. Real and F. Schmittinger. Springer International Publishing, pp. 129-138. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78733-2_13 .

Merzagora, M., Mignan, V. and Rodari, P., eds. (2015). Listening and empowering. Crossing the social inclusion and the science in society agendas in science communication activities involving young people. Trieste, Italy: Jcom and TRACES.

Perronet, C. (2018). 'La culture scientifique des enfants en milieux populaires: étude de cas sur la construction sociale du goût, des pratiques et des représentations des sciences'. PhD thesis. Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon et Centre Max Weber. URL: https://www.theses.fr/2018LYSEN076 .

Simon, N. (2010). The participatory museum. Santa Cruz, CA, U.S.A.: Museum 2.0. URL: http://www.participatorymuseum.org .

- (2016). The art of relevance. Santa Cruz, CA, U.S.A.: Museum 2.0. URL: http://www.artofrelevance.org .

Authors

All authors are part of the team of Association Traces.

Matteo Merzagora is director of the association and leads the ESPGG project. E-mail: matteo.merzagora@groupe-traces.fr .

Claudia Aguirre leads European projects, evaluation, and the "Rayon science" project. E-mail: claudia.aguirre@groupe-traces.fr .

Paul Boniface leads the mediation activities and European projects. E-mail: paul.boniface@groupe-traces.fr .

Clementine Bricout leads the science engagement events. E-mail: clementine.bricout@groupe-traces.fr .

Celine Martineau leads inclusion projects, the E-Fabrik' project and the training activities. E-mail: celine.martineau@groupe-traces.fr .

Endnotes

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Valuing visitors' knowledge: the experience of Association Traces at the crossroads between science communication, participatory activities and social inclusion

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In this "practice insight" we present a series of experiences run by Association Traces, injecting participatory approaches into science engagement activities by valuing the knowledge of the public rather than focusing on their ignorance. Starting from the observation that a sort of hybridization is occurring between

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Science with and for society in Horizon 2020

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Science with and for society in Horizon 2020

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Directorate-General for Research and Innovation

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Science with and for society in Horizon 2020 : achievements and recommendations for Horizon Europe.

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Inclusiveness on all levels underpins SwafS. We need science education for all, gender equality in our organisations, ethics and integrity embedded in research, communication we can trust, open science and ultimately place citizens at the core to ensure excellent Research and Innovation to tackle the challenges of today for a better future.

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Eurobarometer 2020 - 2021 (science and technology)

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Eurobarometer 2020 - 2021 (science and technology)

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The Meaning of 'Public Understanding of Science' in the United States After World War II

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Lewenstein, B. V. (1992). The Meaning of 'Public Understanding of Science' in the United States After World War II. Public Understanding of Science, 1(1), 45-68.

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Department of Communication, University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany

Junior Research Group, Communicating Scientists: Challenges, Competencies, Contexts (fourC), Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

Department of Psychology, University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany

Scientists (and science as a whole) provide evidence and advice for societal problem solving and collective decision-making. For this advice to be heard, the public must be willing to trust science, where "trust" means that one can confidently expect science to provide reliable knowledge and evidence, even if one's understanding of science is bounded. According to the sociological and psychological literature, citizens' basic attitudes toward, experiences with, and perceived trustworthiness of the trustee serve as antecedents of trust. From this, we developed a model for the public's trust in science, and we tested this model in a nationally representative survey in Switzerland ( N = 1,050). The analysis reveals that trust in science was best predicted by positivistic attitudes toward science ( β = 0.33) and to a lesser extent by trustworthiness assessments of scientists ( β = 0.24). Experiences with science did not predict trust in science ( β = 0.07). These results suggest that stable basic attitudes toward science and its role in society are grounds on which trust in science can be built.

Introduction

While today's societies largely rest on innovations and technologies that have been developed through scientific advances, they also face new and threatening challenges such as climate change and pandemics. For such issues to be understood and potentially solved, societies must rely on and trust scientific knowledge, alongside social, economic, and political knowledge. That is, trust in science and scientists is required for the functioning of modern democracies. The importance of trust in science for societal well-being became particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, as studies showed that acceptance of protective measures depended on trust in science ( Dohle, Wingen, and Schreiber 2020; Battiston, Kashyap, and Rotondi 2021).

Most of us lack a deep understanding not only of scientific concepts or theories but also of how scientific knowledge is produced. Hence, due to the division of labor in our societies, we must rely on scientists' knowledge when using science-based technologies and making personal or civic decisions on issues that involve scientific knowledge. Citizens-who often encounter science via communication in legacy and social media ( European Commission 2021)-especially need to trust science despite their bounded understanding of science and about science ( Bromme and Goldman 2014; Keren 2018). Science communication plays a fundamental role in cultivating trust in science among citizens by providing scientific information about results as well as about scientific methods and norms ( Schäfer 2016). As such, science communication provides the public with opportunities to form attitudes about the trustworthiness of scientists and the credibility of scientific information-both of which can be conceived as key determinants of trust in science ( Fiske and Dupree 2014).

In our study, we build on literature on trust and science communication to develop a theoretical model of trust in science. The model conceptualizes experiences with science, trustworthiness of scientists and basic orientations toward science as antecedents of trust in science. The selection of these antecedents allows us to test different psychological and sociological approaches to explain trust in science. In the empirical part, we test the model using data from a nationally representative survey in Switzerland to gain an understanding of the relative impact of the predictors. By theoretically embedding and empirically testing basic orientations toward science and their relationship with trust in science, our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how to conceptualize long-term attitudes toward the performance of the system of science, and their role for building trust in science.

Trust in Science

Judgments of trustworthiness are central in most psychological trust definitions, but especially in rational choice approaches ( Coleman 1994; Hardin 2004), most of which describe trust as a simple reflection of the trustee's trustworthiness ( Kee and Knox 1970; Sztompka 2000). In approaches focusing on trust in systems, trustworthiness plays a subordinate role. Nevertheless, following Giddens (1990), we argue that judgments of scientists as representatives of the system also play a role for trust in science as a system. Representatives of systems serve as access points at which citizens can get in contact with the system and build expectations that are reflected in their trust in science. We will therefore consider epistemic trustworthiness of scientists as one predictor of public trust in science.

Research on trust in systems described long-term orientations toward the system of interest as a further antecedent of trust, such as satisfaction with democracy ( Zmerli, Newton, and Montero 2007). Accordingly, in the context of trust in science, we refer to antecedents of trust as one's basic orientations toward science ( Brossard and Nisbet 2007). People hold expectations toward science's role in society ( Priest, Bonfadelli, and Rusanen 2003; Gauchat 2011), which are often shaped by people's worldviews, socialization, and past experiences ( Gauchat 2011; Howell et al., 2020). As we will detail below, these orientations reflect both positivistic attitudes toward science (e.g., beliefs in its problem-solving capacity) and critical attitudes toward it (such as populist views criticizing the knowledge and power of allegedly immoral academic elites; Mede and Schäfer 2020).

Finally, trust research considers experiences with the trustee as central for both interpersonal judgements of trustworthiness (e.g. Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman 1995) and trust in systems ( Giddens 1990). Following this, the frequency of experiences with science, often enabled through science communication ( Schäfer 2016), may predict how people form expectations toward science and scientists and, thus, may also be important for generating trust. Therefore, we examine how experiences with science in online and offline contexts contributes to citizens' evaluations of scientists' trustworthiness and their trust in science in general.

In sum, we define trust in science as one's willingness to rely on science and scientists (as representatives of the system) despite having a bounded understanding of science and the risk of not getting to the "truth" (that is, they accept dependency despite vulnerability and risk). Thereby, individuals' trust in science is based on the following expectations: 1) that scientists make epistemically warranted claims and 2) that science provides benefits for society. As we point out below, these two sets of expectations may directly manifest in epistemic trustworthiness ascriptions to scientists, but they may also produce, on the more general level, either affirmative perceptions ("positivistic beliefs") or critical views of science ("science-related populist attitudes"). We further argue that these expectations are partly formed through experiences with science. Therefore, in this paper, we develop theoretical arguments for a model of trust in science and its predictors ( Figure 1). In the following, we describe the theoretical reasoning behind this model and we provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the model using a representative sample from Switzerland.

FIGURE 1. Theoretical model of trust in science.

Judgments of Scientists' Epistemic Trustworthiness

In the context of science, judgments of trustworthiness reflect deliberate or spontaneous cognitive processes that help decide whether to accept a scientist's knowledge claims as true, hence, they are directed at a scientists' epistemic trustworthiness ( Origgi 2004). Epistemic trustworthiness judgments are based on inferences from cues available and relevant in a certain situation ( Landrum, Eaves, and Shafto 2015); such as an author's field of study, affiliation, inferred communicative intentions, or language use in science communication ( Hendriks and Kienhues 2019 for a review). Three dimensions have been found to be important ( Hendriks, Kienhues, and Bromme 2015): To be ascribed epistemic trustworthiness, scientists should possess expertise on the topic of interest; integrity, that is, adhere to the rules and conventions of the scientific endeavor; and benevolence, that is, behave according to commonly agreed upon moral or social values. Science as an epistemic endeavor aims to produce claims about the (natural) world that have been held against scientific scrutiny and can, thus, be assumed to be "true" for the time being ( Hendriks, Kienhues, and Bromme 2015). Thus, scientists are expected to possess pertinent and extensive knowledge about a problem to guarantee for the veracity of knowledge claims; they are expected to follow up on this using reliable scientific methods up to current standards, and finally, they are expected to keep in mind the interests of others when producing knowledge, that is, contribute to science's social role in society. As such, evaluations of scientists' trustworthiness correspond closely to the epistemic requirements that warrant (public) trust in science, as explained above. Empirically, studies on trust in systems usually do not differentiate between trust in the system and evaluations of the trustworthiness of representatives of the system, nor do they consider the relationship of the two constructs. We add this aspect to the literature and assume that:
H1: Judgments of scientists' trustworthiness positively predict trust in science.
Basic Orientations Toward Science as Antecedents of Perceived Trustworthiness of Scientists and Trust in Science

Positivistic Attitudes Toward Science

Attitudes about science have long been investigated in research on the public understanding of science, especially with a focus on long-term developments and differences between countries ( Bauer, Petkova, and Boyadjieva 2000; Bauer, Allum, and Miller 2007; Castell et al., 2014; National Science Board 2018; European Commission 2021), and have been found to predict trust in science ( Roberts et al., 2013). In contrast to these general attitudes, the term "deference to scientific authority" is often used to describe a value disposition or stable worldview directed at the cultural authority of science ( Brossard and Nisbet 2007; Akin et al., 2021). In short, deference to scientific authority encompasses the belief that science can deliver "true facts" about the (natural) world ( Brossard and Nisbet 2007; Howell et al., 2020). That is, while attitudes toward science and trust in science have been found to vary in accordance with the topic or specific actors or institutions (possibly because of topic-specific attitudes or situation-specific judgements of trustworthiness), deference to scientific authority may reflect a more general belief system that is rather stable ( Howell et al., 2020). This notion fits well with accounts of trust that include anticipatory positive emotions or confidence ( Engdahl and Lidskog 2014; Cummings 2020). In fact, deference to scientific authority has been positively linked to evaluations of scientists as sources of information (A. A. Anderson et al., 2012; Howell et al., 2020).

In consequence of these findings, it is reasonable to assume that trust in science (as a system) should also reflect the trustor's general confidence in science as a way of knowing. However, the notion of epistemic trust as outlined above does not imply that this trust insinuates blind acceptance of scientific authority (even though these two concepts might be related; Howell et al., 2020); rather, positivistic beliefs should generally shift judgments of scientists' trustworthiness and trust in science to the positive. Thus, to avoid conceptual confusion (and to reflect that we used items that could be assigned both to general attitudes toward science as well as to the belief in and the deference to the authority of science), we refer to positivistic attitudes toward science to reflect relatively stable attitudes pertaining to individual views of science as a unique contributor of knowledge about the (natural) world. Even though evidence is scarce, and measurements of both concepts vary ( Gauchat 2011; Xiao 2013; Besley 2018; Howell et al., 2020), positivistic attitudes toward science seem to be related to trust in science. From a theoretical standpoint, positivistic attitudes toward science should have an overall positive effect on trust in science and trustworthiness attributions to scientists. Therefore, we test their capacity to predict people's trust in science as well as the trustworthiness of scientists.
H2: Positivistic attitudes toward science positively predict trust in science. H3: Positivistic attitudes toward science positively predict judgements of scientists' trustworthiness.
Science-Related Populism

Individuals who endorse science-related populism can be described as holding "science-related populist attitudes" ( Mede, Schäfer, and Füchslin 2021). Such attitudes have been conceptualized as a multidimensional construct (similar to political populist attitudes; Schulz et al., 2018), with each dimension reflecting one of the four theoretical components of science-related populism, i.e., (positive) conceptions of the ordinary people, (negative) conceptions of the academic elite, demands for science-related decision-making sovereignty, and demands for truth-speaking sovereignty ( Mede, Schäfer, and Füchslin 2021). Importantly, diagnosing science-related populism requires that all these four components occur simultaneously within a person: Individuals who only hold negative conceptions of academic elites, for example, but reject the three other components, may only be described as supporters of anti-academic views but not as proponents of science-related populism. This premise has been described as non-compensatoriness ( Wuttke, Schimpf, and Schoen 2020).

So far, empirical research on science-related populist attitudes among the general public and how they relate to trust in science is scarce. Some isolated aspects of science-related attitudes and related phenomena have been investigated in several survey and experimental studies; these studies suggest, for example, that trust in societal institutions is lower among people who hold populist attitudes ( Geurkink et al., 2020), support anti-elite views ( Silva et al., 2017), and endorse conspiracy theories ( Miller, Saunders, and Farhart 2016). Similarly, trust in universities and university researchers tends to be lower among voters of populist parties in countries like Finland ( Saarinen, Koivula, and Keipi 2020) and Israel ( Filc and Lebel 2005). Further research suggests that endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs is associated with lower perceived trustworthiness of scientists ( Fasce and Picó 2019), that disapproval of the scientific method is linked with lower public trust in science ( Gauchat 2011), and that people who reject scientific authority have less trust in scientists to tell them the truth about the risks and benefits of nanotechnology ( Anderson et al., 2012). Findings like these are in line with results from Mede et al. (2021), which indicate that science-related populist attitudes are negatively correlated with trust in science, trust in university scientists-and, positivistic attitudes toward science suggesting that it makes people's lives better. Accordingly, we hypothesize the following:
H4: Science-related populism negatively predicts trust in science. H5: Science-related populism negatively predicts judgements of scientists' trustworthiness.
Experiences With Science as an Antecedent of Scientists' Trustworthiness

Our argument is based on the idea put forth by Giddens (1990) of "facework connections" (p.83), suggesting that communication with representatives of a system is an important factor for building trust in systems. In general, science is perceived by most citizens as being disembedded from everyday life. Thus, instances of science communication and outreach may help to re-embed science and to bring citizens and science closer together through direct or mediated communication with science and scientists ( Reif 2021). Based on this argument, communication with individuals serve as access points, which potentially influence peoples' trust in the system and its representatives.

The relationship between experiences and trustworthiness is long established in the literature. Following Sztompka (2000), past experiences are the main foundation of trustworthiness, and other popular trust models centrally locate the role of experiences ( Zucker 1986; Lewicki and Bunker 1995; Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman 1995; Endreß 2002). Some authors argue that the channel through which people communicate with trustees is important, and they further argue that social presence is an indispensable prerequisite of trustworthiness ( Cyr et al., 2007). Experiences with the trustee are often obtained indirectly through reported experiences of others or by imputation from outcomes of prior direct or mediated exchange ( Zucker 1986).

Science communication and outreach are therefore central for people's experiences with science and scientists. Experience with science can be differentiated by their online- or offline-occurrence, whether they reflect mass-mediated or non-mass-mediated communication, and along their level of interaction. Perceiving information about science in media coverage (e.g., in newspapers, TV, or radio) or online (e.g., via social networks, blogs, YouTube, or Wikipedia) represents the lowest level of interaction. The level of interaction rises if the situation for communicating with science allows active engagement. Traditionally, people experience science interactively by visiting museums, zoos, or talking with friends. In recent years, these possibilities have been supplemented by online channels, which are increasingly used for finding out about science and to interact with science ( Brossard 2013; Su et al., 2015; National Science Board, 2018). In the online context, the interactive features of social media allow people to communicate with scientists directly; Reif et al. (2020) argue that this possibility can positively influence people's trust in scientists. Huber et al. (2019) argue that social media increases trust in science because it offers the possibility to interact with sources of similar mindsets that the individual may trust. In the offline context, meeting scientists in person at events or discussing science with friends represent forms with high interactivity.

Nonetheless, some evidence also suggests that non-interactive experiences with scientific information contribute to how people perceive scientists and judge their trustworthiness. Su et al. (2015) showed that people who prefer online-only information sources have higher scientific knowledge, which was similarly shown by Dudo et al. (2011), who further found a positive relation between Internet use and attitudes toward science. For offline forms such as scientific information obtained through newspapers or magazines, empirical evidence on their influence on judgements of trustworthiness is relatively limited (for exceptions see Hmielowski et al., 2014), but findings nonetheless suggest that news media could play a role for evaluating scientists' trustworthiness. In sum, we argue that all interactions with science (online or offline, interactive or non-interactive) should positively predict trust in science and the trustworthiness judgments of scientists.

H6: Communicative experiences with science positively predict trust in science.

H7: Communicative experiences with science positively predict judgements of scientists' trustworthiness.

Method and Measurement

Data

To test our hypotheses, we relied on the Science Barometer Switzerland survey, a nationally representative population survey in Switzerland, which was fielded from 17 June to July 20, 2019. The sample contained 1,050 respondents (age: M = 48.3, SD = 17.3; 53.5% female; 47.8% attained tertiary education). Respondents were recruited via public telephone listings (81%, age and gender quotas) and random digit dialing (19%, no quota) and surveyed in computer-assisted telephone interviews led by professional interviewers of the Swiss polling company Demoscope. 2.6% of all calls resulted in completed interviews, whereas 21.7% were answered but interview requests were denied, and 75.7% were not picked up in the first place or reached a dead number.

Measurements

To measure trust in science, we used a single-item question ( Supplementary Appendix SA2 for all item wordings and scales used), asking "On a scale of 1-5, where 1 means "very low" and 5 means "very high", how high would you say is your trust in science in general?" Single-item measures like these have been employed and tested in various large-scale survey studies on public perceptions of science and research (e.g. National Science Board 2018) and have been shown to correlate strongly with multi-item measures of trust in science (Supplementary Appendix SA1 in Wellcome Trust 2019).

To measure epistemic trustworthiness perceptions, we used the Muenster Epistemic Trustworthiness Inventory (METI), a reliable and well-established semantic differential scale for measuring individuals' trustworthiness evaluations of scientists in opinion surveys and experiments ( Hendriks, Kienhues, and Bromme 2015). Due to questionnaire length restrictions, we relied on a shortened nine-item version. To construct this shortened METI, we ran a confirmatory factor analysis on the original data from Hendriks et al. (2015) and selected the three best-performing items for each of the three trustworthiness dimensions (χ ² = 66.539, df = 24, p = 0.004; CFI = 0.971, TLI = 0.957, RMSEA = 0.072, SRMR = 0.056; all factor loadings p < 0.001). Our nine-item METI can thus be considered a parsimonious yet reliable survey scale to measure epistemic trustworthiness on three dimensions. For the analyses, we computed unweighted mean values of each of the three METI dimensions, with higher values indicating greater perceived expertise, integrity, and benevolence, respectively.

Positivistic attitudes toward science were measured with five items tapping into different aspects of optimistic views on science and its merits for individuals and society ( von Roten 2009; Pardo and Calvo 2002; Prpić 2011). These items have been tested and validated in a range of large-scale survey studies in several countries and are well-established measures in survey research on science communication and public perceptions of science and research (e.g. European Commission 2010; National Science Board 2018). To examine if the items form one stable factor, we performed an exploratory factor analysis using oblimin rotation (Kaiser-Mayer Olkin = 0.75, Bartletts' χ ² [4] = 159.6, p < 0.001) with data from a previous wave of the Science Barometer Switzerland. The analysis resulted in one factor with an eigenvalue of 2.17, explaining 43% of the variance. Hence, we used a mean score of all five items in our analyses, with higher values representing more positivistic attitudes toward science (Cronbach's Alpha = 0.70).

Science-related populist attitudes were measured with the SciPop Scale, a robust eight-item survey scale, which quantifies science-related populist attitudes along its four conceptual components and has been tested and validated in different languages and samples in Switzerland ( Mede, Schäfer, and Füchslin 2021; Mede and Schäfer 2021). The components were captured by four two-item subscales (Spearman-Brown reliability coefficients: 0.75, 0.78, 0.73, 0.78, respectively) following Mede, Schäfer, and Füchslin (2021). For our hypothesis tests (H1-H5), we used a single aggregate score to quantify science-related populist attitudes, which we obtained by taking the smallest value of the four subscale means ( Mede, Schäfer, and Füchslin 2021). This approach accounts for the conceptual premise that science-related populism relies on the concurrent presence of all four dimensions (whereas other approaches, such as averaging all eight item values, would produce high populism scores for respondents who endorse some dimensions fully but reject others completely; Wuttke et al., 2020).

Communicative experiences with science: We asked respondents about their mass-mediated and non-mass-mediated experiences with science.

Exploratory analyses of the mass-mediated experiences with science using survey data from a previous wave of the Science Barometer Switzerland corroborated what conceptual considerations had suggested, namely that differentiated investigations of people's experiences with science and research necessitate distinguishing between low-interactive and high-interactive experiences. An exploratory factor analysis using oblimin rotation (Kaiser-Mayer Olkin = 0.77, Bartletts' χ ² [11] = 182.96, p < 0.001) resulted in three factors with an eigenvalue of 5.41, explaining 49% of the variance. The factors differentiate the level of activity needed to encounter scientific information (high scores indicate more frequent experiences). Factor 1 included items asking respondents for their use of social networks, YouTube, and blogs for getting scientific information ( α = 0.62). The second factor included using magazines, scientific websites, and websites of newspapers and magazines for getting scientific information ( α = 0.55). The third factor included items asking the respondents for their use of radio, online media libraries, and television for getting scientific information ( α = 0.52).

Non-mass-mediated experiences with science were measured with items asking respondents about ways to engage with science in person. An exploratory factor analysis using oblimin rotation (Kaiser-Mayer Olkin = 0.62, Bartletts' χ ² [6] = 593.21, p < 0.001) resulted in one factor with an eigenvalue of 1.93, explaining 48% of the variance: The factor included visiting events and museums, talking to peers, visiting zoos, and using messengers to talk about science ( α = 0.66, high scores indicate more frequent experiences).

Controls: Existing research indicates that people's epistemic trustworthiness perceptions, positivistic attitudes toward science, science-related populist attitudes, and (mass-mediated) experiences with science may depend on sociodemographic characteristics and other attitudes toward science ( Nisbet et al., 2002; Metag 2020; Besley, Lee, and Pressgrove 2021). Therefore, we controlled for age (continuous), gender (dichotomous), formal education (categorical), interest in science, attention to media coverage on science and research, scientific literacy, and proximity to science measuring personal acquaintances with scientists.

Analysis Strategy

We followed the two-step approach recommended by Anderson and Gerbing (1988). First, to test for convergent and discriminant validity of the constructs, we performed a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Second, we tested the structural model based on the measurement model identified in the first stage. This approach makes it possible to determine if misspecifications in the final model are grounded in the measurement of the constructs or the theoretical specifications. In the second stage, we tested not only our theoretical model but also the next-best constrained and the next-best unconstrained model. Comparing these three models makes it possible to judge if adding or deleting paths changes the model fit.

All models were estimated using structural equation modeling ( Supplementary Appendix A1 for means, standard deviations, and intercorrelations of the variables). We relied on the lavaan R-package version 0.6-7, ( Rosseel 2012) using maximum likelihood estimation with robust standard errors and a mean- and variance-adjusted test statistic (MLMVS) as the estimator. We used this estimator because of high levels of kurtosis and moderate levels of skewness for several variables in our sample. Missing data were imputed using case-wise maximum likewise estimation because the overall percentage of missing values was under the threshold of 5% ( Kline 1998). We used item parceling on the level of dimensions to achieve a parsimonious model ( Bandalos 2002). Experiences with science and perceived trustworthiness of scientists were included as second-order constructs measured by the dimensions indicated above. Positivistic attitudes and science-related populist attitudes were included as mean indices based on the description in the methods section.

The model fit was assessed using the probability of the mean- and variance-adjusted chi-square value ( p ≥ 0.05), root-mean square error of approximation (RMSEA ≤0.06), Tucker Lewis index (TLI ≥0.95), standardized root-mean square residual (SRMR <0.08), and the comparative fit index (CFI ≥0.9) as recommended by Hu and Bentler (1999).

Results

Measurement Model

The CFA of the measurement model showed an overall good model fit and met the limits proposed by Hu and Bentler (1999) for three fit indices (χ ² p < 0.001, CFI = 0.95, RMSEA = 0.06, TLI = 0.92, SRMR = 0.04). An analysis of the correlation matrix ( Supplementary Appendix A1) showed initial evidence for the convergent and discriminant validity of the constructs. To formally evaluate the discriminant validity, we followed the procedure recommended by Anderson and Gerbing (1988) and used chi-square difference tests for constrained and unconstrained models. We run this test for every possible pairing of constructs in our study ( Supplementary Appendix A4). All unconstrained models returned a significantly lower chi-square value indicating a good discriminant validity of our constructs.

Structural Model

A structural model ( Figure 2) based on the theoretical model ( Figure 1) with the control variables included on the level of the dimensions of the constructs showed an overall good goodness of fit and met the limits proposed by Hu and Bentler (1999) for three fit indices (χ ² p < 0.001, CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = 0.04, TLI = 0.94, SRMR = 0.02). Following the recommendations of Anderson and Gerbing (1988), we compared the theoretical model with a null model, a saturated model, and the next most likely constrained and unconstrained alternative models from a theoretical perspective. All models performed significantly worse or not significantly better than the theoretical model ( Supplementary Appendix A5). Therefore, we conclude that our model fits the data and is suitable for analyzing our hypotheses.

FIGURE 2. Structural equation model. Notes: scipop = science-related populism; trustworth = trustworthiness of scientists; pos = positivistic attitudes toward science; exp = communicative experiences with science; non-med = non-mass-mediated experiences; med = mass-mediated experiences; hiInt = highly interactive experiences; meInt = medium interactive experiences; loInt = low interactive experiences.

Looking at the hypothesized effects ( Figure 3), we can already reject H6 and H7. Experiences with science did not significantly predict the perceived trustworthiness of scientists ( β = 0.01, p = 0.90) and trust in science ( β = 0.07, p = 0.11). Additionally, all control variables did not contribute relevant explanatory power for trust in science, however, they influenced other constructs in the model significantly.

FIGURE 3. Structural Model ( N = 742); path coefficients are standardized estimates; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001.

Focusing on the hypotheses referring to trust in science as the dependent variable, H1, H2, and H4 were confirmed according to our data. The perceived trustworthiness of scientists positively predicted trust in science ( β = 0.24, p < 0.001), as did positivistic attitudes ( β = 0.33, p < 0.001). Science-related populist attitudes negatively predicted trust in science ( β = −0.11, p < 0.01). Positivistic attitudes toward science were by far the best predictor of trust in science. In addition to the direct effect, science-related populism and positivistic attitudes also influenced trust in science indirectly by contributing to the perceived trustworthiness of scientists ( Table 1).

TABLE 1. Standardized path coefficients of the predictors on trust in science.

H3 and H5 were also supported, indicating that positivistic attitudes positively ( β = 0.29, p < 0.001) and populist attitudes negatively ( β = −0.13, p < 0.01) predict the perceived trustworthiness of scientists.

Discussion

In this study, we tested a theoretical model of trust in science ( Figure 1) and found that positivistic attitudes are the strongest predictor of the trustworthiness of scientists and trust in science, while science-related populist attitudes negatively predict both to a lesser degree. Communicative experiences with science (mass-mediated and non-mass-mediated combined) neither predicted judgments of the epistemic trustworthiness of scientists, nor trust in science. Surprisingly, the epistemic trustworthiness ascribed to scientists as representatives of science as a system is not a very strong predictor of trust in science.

Psychological conceptualizations, especially rational choice-based concepts on interpersonal trust put the perceived trustworthiness of the trustee as the central influencing variable; some authors even speak of trust as "reflected trustworthiness" ( Sztompka, 2000). Overall, the consensus is that trustworthiness is the most important predictor of trust and can be divided into dimensions, of which expertise, benevolence, and integrity are the most popular. Sociological conceptualizations of trust in systems place prior experience at the center of their considerations and frame trust as an expectation based on accumulated experience with the trusted party. In this context, individuals serve as access points to systems, which in turn are assessed against the dimensions of trustworthiness mentioned above and contribute to one's overall impression of the system. In summary, and applying these arguments to the topical context of science, prior experiences with scientists as representatives of the system and the assessment of their trustworthiness should significantly determine trust in science.

Our study takes these considerations as a starting point and goes beyond them, asking how basic orientations toward the performance of the system of science influence trust in science. This focus on orientations toward the trustee has been largely omitted from previous research, whereby such research has generally shown that trust in science is linked to a general willingness to defer to scientific knowledge. Similarly, our study found that basic orientations toward science are the strongest predictor of trust in science. However, our results unravel this relationship: Especially positivistic attitudes positively predict trust in science, but science-related populist attitudes negatively predict trust in science. Our hypothesis, mainly derived from psychological trust research, that perceived trustworthiness of scientists positively influences trust in science was confirmed, but the effect size is comparatively small. Therefore, interpreting trust as an expression of the trustworthiness of representatives of the system would be an inappropriate oversimplification.

Contrary to sociological conceptualizations of trust in systems, encountering scientific information and potentially interacting with scientists in traditional media, online settings, or non-mass-mediated forms of science communication had no significant effect on trust in science and perceived trustworthiness of scientists. Accordingly, the influence of citizens' experiences with science via science communication on trust in science seems rather modest, compared to other factors involved in our study. However, measuring people's willingness to actively seek scientific information has also been conceptualized as science curiosity (Kahan et al., 2017) instead of self-reported experiences. Future research on the relation between people's engagement or experiences with science and trust in science should further develop this concept and measurement.

According to our results, how people judge if a scientist is trustworthy and if they trust science is primarily dependent on general attitudes toward science. Yet interestingly, (communicative) experiences with science were positively correlated to science-related populism as well as positivistic attitudes toward science. This finding suggests that people with both skeptical and very positive attitudes seem to have frequent experiences with science, which resonates with findings in the context of science communication on climate change ( Leiserowitz et al., 2012). Going beyond the frequency of communicative experiences, it is particularly important to examine the quality of experiences and the kind of sources used by people with skeptical and positivistic attitudes toward science. Our results support this endeavor, which is particularly driven by research on motivated reasoning and selective exposure (e.g. Maier et al., 2014; Druckman and McGrath 2019). Future research could differentiate among different kinds of experiences with science communication and evaluate their influence on trust in science as well as the trustworthiness of scientists.

A closer look at trustworthiness suggests that these perceptions are predicted by positivistic and science-related populist attitudes. Thus, when people hold positivistic attitudes and are less prone to science-related populist attitudes, they are more likely to deem scientists trustworthy-possibly because they think that scientists live up to their expectations, making epistemically warranted claims and providing benefits to society. These findings underline the importance of basic orientations toward the system, which also predict evaluative judgements about its representatives.

Taken together, our analysis highlights the importance of including several antecedents to uncover how trust in science manifests in and interacts with people's belief system. However, the factors included in our analysis apparently did not capture all relevant factors needed to explain trust in science and the perception of scientists' trustworthiness. The model fit suggests that there might be additional explanatory variables. One promising path for finding these may be to include measures of experiences with science that go beyond asking respondents about points of contact with science and scientists. Instead, future studies could focus on the quality of experiences with science, asking respondents, for example, whether they have had positive or even personally meaningful (communicative) experiences with science, scientists, or scientific communication because they received valuable information on an issue they did not previously understand or important information for individual decision-making. This is especially relevant considering that further results ( Figure 3) indicate a positive correlation between (communicative) experiences with science and science-related populism, suggesting that it is not the quantity of experiences with science that shapes attitudes, but the specific sources people use to inform themselves and how those sources portray science and scientists. Furthermore, future studies could examine whether access points to science could be topic dependent and whether differences exist for citizens accessing scientific information in online vs offline channels. Results of our and further studies should then be scrutinized in terms of their implications for science communication practice: For example, science communicators may facilitate long-term positivistic attitudes toward science by providing citizens with further "access points" to science (e.g., via participatory science communication formats), and alleviate science-related populist attitudes by targeting dis- and misinformation spread by populist actors (e.g., via inoculation campaigns).

Furthermore, our model only addresses expectations toward science and scientists that reflect more stable views of and attitudes toward science and scientists. However, it might be the case that people often do not access a coherent and comprehensive representation of the scientific system when making these types of judgments on such surveys; instead, they might give more accurate evaluations of how they view science when they are given the context of specific scientific issues ( Liu and Priest 2009; Hendriks, Kienhues, and Bromme 2016). As such, it would also be worthwhile to test the stability of the model identified in this paper for issues or scientific disciplines that involve more or less societal relevance (such as research on climate change vs black holes). Furthermore, experimental research has shown that trustworthiness judgments regarding scientists are based on inferential cues. Thus, trust in science may also depend on parameters in a given situation. For example, trust in science may fundamentally depend on the risks that scientific innovations have for a person or society (e.g. Cummings 2020). Furthermore, a study by Besley et al. (2017) showed that the willingness to see science as a legitimate source of knowledge decreased in the presence of industry-science connections. In sum, we must acknowledge that trust in science might often be more adaptive to a specific topic or information present at a certain point and accessible to the trustor than can be grasped by survey measures or statistically embedded in the present model.

Limitations

The study had several limitations that should be considered when interpreting the results. First, the results of the study may not be generalizable to other countries due to the specific context of Switzerland. Overall, Switzerland's population has been shown to have rather positive conceptions of science and research ( European Commission 2010) and trusts scientists ( Wellcome Trust 2019). Our findings may thus not generalize to other countries where more critical, hostile, or divisive views prevail in society or in public debate ( Rutjens et al., 2018).

Second, due to the cross-sectional approach, we were not able to detect causal relationships empirically. Especially for the relationship between trustworthiness, science-related populist attitudes, and positivistic attitudes, long-term examinations or experimental research would be a valuable supplement to the existing literature.

Third, we recognize a limitation in the one-item measurement of trust in science. As arguments about the conceptualization and measurement of trust in other contexts exist ( Hamm et al., 2019), a definite measurement for trust in science (as a system) still needs to be validated ( Reif and Guenther 2019).

Fourth, our measurement of experiences with science captured a very broad range of communicative experiences, which showed only an acceptable convergent validity. Future studies could focus on more specific communicative experiences and examine their influence on trust in science.

Conclusion

Taken together, our study contributes important findings to the literature on trust as well as to science communication. For science communication, we showed that a person's frequency of communicative experiences with science did not significantly predict trust in science. The high explanatory value of basic orientations toward science suggests that future studies should focus more on these kinds of attitudes when explaining trust in systems. Hence, some promising ways to indirectly increase trust in science might be to communicate how scientific processes are able to produce epistemically reliable knowledge, and to highlight the function that science holds for providing information and solutions to problems on the societal scale.

Data Availability Statement

Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. This data can be found here: https://doi.org/10.23662/FORS-DS-1229-1.

Ethics Statement

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent from the participants' legal guardian/next of kin was not required to participate in this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author Contributions

NM, MS, and JM contributed to the conception of the survey. FW, NM, and FH wrote the manuscript and FW conducted the analysis. All authors contributed to the conception and refinement of the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors, and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge support from the Open Access Publication Fund of the University of Muenster.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.822757/full#supplementary-material

Footnotes

The use of printed newspapers, movies and Wikipedia for scientific information were excluded due to double loadings or low communality

The items asking for radio and television use were slightly different between the waves. In 2016, we asked for radio/television in general and in 2019 for radio/television excluding the SRF. We nonetheless proceeded with the factor structure found in the data from 2016 in the following analyses

The inter-factor correlations did not surpass the 0.44 level, which suggests good discriminant validity. The correlations of trust with the dimensions of trustworthiness range from 0.33 to 0.34 and were much lower than the intra-factor correlations which range from 0.52 to 0.69. This suggests a very good convergent and discriminant validity of the trustworthiness scale. The intra-factor correlations for communicative experiences with science were very mixed (ranging from 0.06 to 0.47), indicating a rather low convergent validity of the construct. However, all factor loadings were highly significant ( Supplementary Appendix A3) and had the correct direction indicating an acceptable convergent validity ( Anderson and Gerbing, 1988).

In the constrained model, the covariance between the constructs is set to one. If the chi-square value for the unconstrained model is significantly lower, the discriminant validity is supported

We constrained the error variance of the latent variable capturing mass-mediated experiences with science to equal zero, because it was not significantly different from zero. We tested this with z-tests and a likelihood-ratio test comparing the constrained and unconstrained model

Specifications of the models: null model = all parameters relating the constructs fixed at zero; saturated model = all parameters relating the constructs are estimated; next most likely constrained model = paths from positivistic attitudes and science-related populism to trust subtracted, thereby eliminating the direct influence of orientations toward science on trust in science; unconstrained model = paths from the dimensions of experiences to science-related populism and positivistic attitudes added

Scientific interest ( β = 0.10, p < 0.01) and attention to media coverage on science ( β = 0.08, p < 0.05) significantly predicted trust in science, but they showed very low effect sizes. Science-related populist attitudes were significantly predicted by the control variables age ( β = 0.14, p < 0.001), education ( β = −0.16, p < 0.001), political orientation ( β = 0.14, p < 0.001), and scientific literacy ( β = −0.17, p < 0.001). Perceived expertise of scientists was significantly predicted by political orientation ( β = −0.10, p < 0.01), age ( β = −0.09, p < 0.05), scientific literacy ( β = 0.07, p < 0.05), and attention to media coverage ( β = 0.10, p < 0.05). Scientists' perceived integrity was significantly predicted by attention to media coverage ( β = 0.10, p < 0.05). Attention to media coverage also predicted scientists' perceived benevolence ( β = 0.12, p < 0.01). Non-mediated experiences with science were predicted by scientific interest ( β = 0.23, p < 0.001), attention to media coverage ( β = 0.29, p < 0.001), age ( β = −0.10, p < 0.01), and education ( β = 0.11, p < 0.01). Highly interactive mass-mediated experiences were significantly predicted by age ( β = −0.34, p < 0.001), scientific literacy ( β = −0.14, p < 0.001), scientific interest ( β = 0.11, p < 0.01), attention to media coverage ( β = 0.12, p < 0.01), and education ( β = −0.07, p < 0.05). Mediumly interactive mass-mediated experiences were significantly predicted by scientific interest ( β = 0.27, p < 0.001), attention to media coverage ( β = 0.40, p < 0.001), age ( β = −0.10, p < 0.01), and education ( β = 0.10, p < 0.01). Low interactive mass-mediated experiences were significantly predicted by age ( β = 0.26, p < 0.001), attention to media coverage ( β = 0.17, p < 0.001), scientific literacy ( β = −0.11, p < 0.01), and proximity to science ( β = −0.10, p < 0.01). Positivistic attitudes were significantly predicted by scientific interest ( β = 0.16, p < 0.001), attention to media coverage ( β = 0.18, p < 0.001), and scientific literacy ( β = −0.10, p < 0.01)

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Predicting Public Trust in Science: The Role of Basic Orientations Toward Science, Perceived Trustworthiness of Scientists, and Experiences With Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scientists (and science as a whole) provide evidence and advice for societal problem solving and collective decision-making. For this advice to be heard, the public must be willing to trust science, where "trust" means that one can confidently expect science to provide reliable knowledge and evidence, even if one's understanding of science is bounded.