Society in Science

Gobo, Giampietro; Marcheselli, Valentina

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-08306-8_4

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The rationale that guided the formulation of questions was to seek positions, attitudes, and opinions that were articulated and differentiated, in order to restore complexity to a topic (science) that is often simplified, radicalized, polarized and dichotomized. For this reason, questions were constructed that could express all positions along a continuum ranging from realism to radical relativism, inspired by the proposal of Gobo and Marcheselli (2022: 111).…”

Section: Trust In Scientists In Italy: a Pilot Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Trust and distrust in science: Embedding the interplay among scientists, mass media and public in Italy during the SARS-Cov-2 outbreak

Gobo,

Campo,

Serafini

2023

Social Science Information

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

COVID-19 pandemic has once again raised the long-standing problem of trust in science and scientists. However, many approaches tend, on one hand, to analyze science as if it were an entirely autonomous entity – and thus to attribute the causes of the decline in trust to factors external to it; on the other hand, these approaches address the question of trust in a dichotomous manner, in terms of presence or absence of it. Rather than assuming a causal and linear direction that proceeds from one domain (‘the outside’ of science) to the other (science), we will draw on those perspectives that investigate the ways in which science interacts with other subsystems. This article aims to propose a more nuanced approach that can contribute to overcoming binary categorizations such as the one that distinguishes between processes internal to the scientific community and factors external to it; such categorizations are somehow implicit in the widespread use of concepts like ‘infodemic’, ‘disinformation’ or ‘pseudoscience’. To this end, two research directions were followed: first, two conflicts between experts that animated the public debate in Italy during the Sars-Cov-2 outbreak and forced scientists to interact following different social subsystems logics were analyzed. Second, in order to go beyond a binary view of trust and to further reveal attitudes toward science and scientists, we conducted a pilot study on a sample of online readers of two Italian newspapers. Overall, a more nuanced view of the issue of trust toward scientists emerges, which is expressed in five different attitudes toward them, and which takes into consideration both the way in which scientists communicate and the philosophy of science they implicitly express in media interactions.

show abstract

Section: Trust In Scientists In Italy: a Pilot Studymentioning

confidence: 99%