Education and Public Attitudes toward Science: Implications for the “Deficit Model” of Education and Support for Science and Technology

Abstract

Objective. By critically examining the deficit model, this research attempts to grasp the multifaceted relationships between education and public attitudes toward science. Methods. It analyzes a series of nationwide surveys of public attitudes toward science conducted over a decade. Results. First, respondents' levels of education and levels of scientific knowledge make independent contributions to public attitudes toward science. Second, college (and postgraduate) majors have very weak effects on public attitudes toward science. Third, education is a much weaker predictor of public attitudes toward controversial scientific research, compared to its strong influence on science in general. Conclusions. Although education may indeed enhance public support for science in general, it may not help much to reduce tensions around politicized, controversial scientific research. For scientific controversies, gender might be a more important variable than education.As science has become ever more deeply embedded in our everyday life, how ordinary people perceive science has attracted growing attention not only from the scientific community, but also from social scientists (Gregory and Miller, 1998;Evans and Durant, 1995; Wynne, 1992Wynne, , 1991Ziman, 1991). For the scientific community, the question of public attitudes toward science largely reflects many scientists' growing concerns over what they see as an antiscience postmodern culture and over the decline of public support for science as a consequence (Gross and Levitt, 1994;Holton, 1993). Meanwhile, social scientists have brought the question of public perceptions of science primarily to bear on how the public participates in decisionmaking processes that shape the direction of science and technology (Freudenburg and Pastor, 1992;Miller, 1983). Social Science QuarterlyDespite the growing interest in public attitudes toward science, however, we are not well informed about the social determinants of public attitudes toward science and how these factors have shaped long-term trends in these attitudes. The present study attempts to reduce this gap by analyzing a series of nationwide surveys of public attitudes toward science conducted over a decade. This study focuses on the effect of education specifically, partly because education is widely viewed as the most important determinant of public attitudes toward science, but also because it has become a central issue in recent debates over public perceptions of science.Even though there exist scores of studies reporting the positive association between education and

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