Global Trust in Scientists: What a 68-Country Study Actually Found

There is a persistent narrative in media and political discourse that the public has lost faith in scientists — that we are living through a “crisis of trust” that threatens evidence-based policymaking on everything from climate change to public health. A landmark new study tests that narrative directly, at global scale, and finds it substantially overstated.

The TISP study, published in Nature Human Behaviour in January 2025, surveyed 71,922 respondents across 68 countries — representing 79% of the global population — in a preregistered, multinational effort involving 241 researchers from 179 institutions. Its central finding: in most countries, most people trust scientists.

That does not mean everything is fine. The study’s real value lies in what it reveals about where trust erodes, who tends to distrust, and the significant gap between what people want scientists to work on and what they believe science actually prioritizes.

The Core Finding: No Country Shows Low Trust

The study measured trust across four dimensions — perceived competence, benevolence, integrity, and openness — using a validated 12-item scale. The overall grand mean was 3.62 on a 1–5 scale (where 3 is neutral and 5 is very high).

No country surveyed showed low overall trust in scientists.

Broken down, the picture is consistent:

• 78% believe scientists are qualified to conduct high-impact research
• 75% agree that scientific research methods are the best way to find out whether something is true or false
• 57% believe most scientists are honest
• 56% believe scientists are concerned about people’s well-being

The weakest dimension was openness — only 42% believe scientists pay sufficient attention to others’ views. This is a meaningful signal for science communicators: the case for greater transparency, better public dialogue, and genuine responsiveness to non-expert concerns is supported by the public’s own perceptions.

Europe: Below the Global Average

One of the more striking regional patterns concerns Europe. Looking at Figure 1 from the paper — which plots weighted mean trust scores for all 68 countries — the European picture is more mixed than many would expect.

The global grand mean is 3.62. Most European countries fall below it:

Several observations stand out:

Europe’s scientific powerhouses are not its trust leaders. Germany (3.49), France (3.43), the Netherlands (3.51), Switzerland (3.45), and Austria (3.42) — countries with strong scientific institutions and high research output — all score below the global mean. Meanwhile Spain (3.91), Ireland (3.84), and the UK (3.82) lead the European field.

The contrast with the Global South is significant. Egypt (4.30), India (4.26), Nigeria (3.98), and Kenya (3.95) all rank considerably higher than any Western European country. The populations that loudest voices in science policy circles often worry about — lower-income countries — actually show stronger trust in scientists than the audiences those voices are speaking to.

Eastern Europe and the former Soviet space show the lowest European scores. Russia (3.23) and Albania (3.05) rank among the lowest globally. The pattern broadly fits the authors’ observation that “Russia as well as several former Soviet republics and satellite states” show relatively low trust. For climate communication practitioners operating across Europe, this east-west gradient is directly relevant.

No European country shows low trust — the scale midpoint is 3.0, and even Albania at 3.05 is just above it. But the concentration of European countries in the 3.35–3.55 range, below the global mean, challenges the assumption that wealthy, highly educated Western societies are natural allies of science.

Who Trusts Less — and Why

The study identifies a consistent set of factors associated with lower trust:

Conservative political orientation. In several European and North American countries, right-leaning and conservative political orientation correlates negatively with trust in scientists. However — and this is a finding that complicates the common narrative — this relationship does not hold globally. In most countries (41 out of 68 for a left-right measure), there is no credible statistical relationship between political orientation and trust. In some Eastern European, Southeast Asian, and African countries, right-leaning individuals actually show higher trust in scientists.

The authors suggest this variability reflects the attitudes of political leadership more than political orientation per se: where right-leaning parties have actively cultivated skepticism toward scientists, that skepticism follows. Where they have not, it does not.

Science-related populism. This is one of the stronger predictors of low trust globally. Science-related populism — the belief that ordinary people’s common sense is superior to scientific expertise — correlates with lower trust across countries. This is not the same as political conservatism; it is a distinct dimension, and one that cuts across left-right lines in many places.

Social dominance orientation. Those who favor social hierarchy and group-based inequality tend to trust scientists less — possibly because they perceive universities and scientific institutions as hierarchy-attenuating forces.

Being male. Women consistently show higher trust in scientists than men across the sample. The authors suggest this may partly reflect differential media representation of scientists.

What People Want Scientists to Do

One of the most policy-relevant sections of the study concerns not trust itself but normative expectations — what people want scientists to prioritize and how involved they want scientists to be in public life.

The findings are striking:

• 83% agree that scientists should communicate about science with the public
• Only 23% disagree that scientists should advocate for specific policies
• Only 19% disagree that scientists should communicate their findings to politicians
• Only 21% disagree that scientists should be more involved in the policymaking process

In short, the idea that the public wants scientists to “stay in their lane” and avoid public engagement is not supported by this data. Large majorities across most countries actively want scientists to participate in democratic discourse and policy.

The Research Priority Gap

Perhaps the most actionable finding concerns the disconnect between what people want scientists to work on and what they believe scientists actually prioritize.

Respondents were asked what goals scientists should prioritize and how strongly they believed science was already tackling each. The results showed a substantial discrepancy across all categories studied:

Poverty reduction showed the largest discrepancy: people want it prioritized, but believe science is not delivering. Defence and military technology showed an inverse pattern — people want it less emphasized than they perceive it to be.

This matters for trust: higher trust correlates with less perceived gap between what science prioritizes and what people want. In other words, trust and perceived relevance are linked. Science communication that highlights work on public health and energy — and that engages honestly with research priority questions — could meaningfully support trust.

Why This Matters for Disinformation

The “crisis of trust in science” narrative is itself a form of misinformation — not deliberately fabricated, but empirically unsupported and potentially self-fulfilling. When people repeatedly hear that trust in scientists has collapsed, some update their views accordingly; when political actors weaponize the narrative, it legitimizes skepticism in the absence of actual reasons for it.

The TISP study’s size and methodological rigor make it a direct counter-evidence resource. Its finding that no country shows low overall trust in scientists is not a reason for complacency — the authors are explicit that even small distrusting minorities can affect policymaking, that a committed minority of 25% can tip majority opinion, and that evidence-resistant minorities can delay scientific consensus on issues like climate change. But it does ground the debate in evidence rather than assumption.

For those working on climate communication and science-based public engagement, the study also highlights a specific challenge: the correlation between science-related populism and low trust suggests that the attack vector matters. Combating disinformation requires not just correcting individual false claims but addressing the underlying epistemic framework — the belief that common sense should override expert consensus — that makes false claims credible in the first place.

This connects directly to inoculation-based approaches explored in work on the Bad Vaxx game and the broader inoculation literature: teaching people to recognize manipulation techniques, rather than debunking individual claims, may be more effective precisely because it addresses the technique rather than the content.

Limitations and Caveats

The study is transparent about its limitations. The online survey format overrepresents urban and educated populations in countries with lower internet penetration. The shared definition of “science” and “scientists” used across languages may not fully capture local variations in meaning. And confirmatory factor analyses showed only configural, not metric or scalar, invariance — a common caveat of multilingual survey research.

The authors also note the ethical complexity of measuring trust in scientists without qualifying that trust is not always warranted. Science’s historical relationship with structural racism, the reproducibility crisis, and cases of genuine scientific misconduct mean that low trust is sometimes a rational response to real experience — particularly in communities that have been harmed by scientific institutions.

Access the Research

The full paper is published open access in Nature Human Behaviour:

Cologna, V., Mede, N.G., Berger, S. et al. Trust in scientists and their role in society across 68 countries. Nat Hum Behav 9, 713–730 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02090-5

The full dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/5C3QD, and an interactive visualization of country-level results is available at https://tisp.shinyapps.io/TISP/.

Related Work

• The Fact-Checking Paradox: When Truth Wins But Society Loses — Why fact-checking alone is insufficient
• Psychological Inoculation Improves Resilience Against Vaccine Misinformation — Teaching technique recognition over claim debunking
• Fake News Festival 2026 — Workshop Collaboration with Viadrina — Bringing this research to public audiences