Credibility Cost of Political Expression on Twitter. Alabrese and colleagues, for the Center For Economic Studies in Munich.
Unsurprisingly, it's not great.
Eleonora Alabrese and colleagues examine scientists’ political expression on Twitter and public perceptions of their credibility. Analysing 98,000 scientists between 2016 and 2022, they find that most are politically neutral, but a sizeable minority have very liberal views. Those with both very liberal and very conservative views are perceived as less credible by the public.
Aporia Magazine includes a good graph. It also put me on to the next two articles.
The first link doesn't work.
ReplyDeleteMy experience is a bit limited, since the people I worked with worked on things that weren't political, and the only "civilian" debate was whether or not to spend money on the research. The leftward skew was fairly substantial, but they couldn't and didn't claim scientific authority for their opinions. (Many have the automatic "everything I don't believe in is trivially wrong" attitude, but scientists aren't the only ones suffering from this delusion.) Nothing should have provoked automatic distrust.
OTOH I've met people who lumped all scientists and all academics into the same pot, never mind what their fields or beliefs were.
Fixed. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, that has been a problem for the right for years, hasn't it? The study even notes that most scientists are neutral, even though there is a "significant minority" who are on the left.