21st-century R&D depends on a strong knowledge society

Digital information services are the infrastructure of the knowledge economy (and of representative democracy). Arguably, trust and signalling on expertise are as important for the knowledge economy as the road rules are for the physical economy. Attitudes towards expertise and trust in science will set the confident knowledge economies apart from the strugglers. Authoritarian states tend to score well on trust in expertise, but historically this mode of authority has been relatively brittle. Liberal-democratic models of authority have often looked weak and messy, but historically have proven to be relatively resilient. But the price of this mode of resilience is vigorous education and debate.

Trusting our research institutions

For research to make a difference, it must be taken and used, and that requires that those who use it place a significant degree of trust in it. When the users are themselves experts in a particular field, they may have the capacity to verify it for themselves to some degree, but when the intended users are laypeople, uptake depends largely on trust in the source.

For this reason, it is vital that ordinary people (that is, all of us, except within very narrow domains for some) trust the research infrastructure and institutions that produce research.

In Australia, trust in expertise remains high overall, but is low in some parts of society. Distrust in expert guidance underlies some cases of vaccine hesitancy and compliance with other health measures; moreover, there are indications that social media and the fragmentation of traditional media threaten to undermine trust further. It is important that we understand the causes and correlates of a decline in trust, to arrest and reverse the slide.

Australian philosophers have illuminated the nature of trust, distinguishing it from mere reliance, and showing that trust is more robust than reliance (see the important work of Karen Jones). They have also collaborated with social scientists, to better understand the causes of mistrust.

Social scientific work on distrust has sometimes been marred by a failure to distinguish false belief from other attitudes. The person who reports that they believe that (say) vaccination is more harmful than the disease it prevents might be reporting a genuine belief, but they might also be doing something else. They might be expressing support for one side of politics (the person who reports believing that climate change is a hoax might report falsely, in order to signal support for Donald Trump, for example). They might be engaged in sheer trolling. They might be mistaken about their own beliefs. Distinguishing these possibilities is important, because different sorts of policy responses are appropriate for different cases.

A group of Australian philosophers and social scientists have explored this theme in Australia. We showed that many people who report believing some well-known conspiracy theories (about climate change, Covid and about 5G) appear to be insincere. This is good news, on the face of it: it suggests that our fellow citizens are more rational than many surveys tend to suggest.

However, it is not unalloyed good news: the circulation of misinformation and insincere report of belief in conspiracy theories may themselves undermine trust in research and researchers, and in government.

This is a research program that Australian philosophers have pioneered and continue to pursue.

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