Have a little faith in me….

On the complex interaction between truth, beliefs and values

With apologies to John Hiatt for nicking his song title.

Sometimes things come together and give you food for thought, or perhaps I should say, food for belief.

It all started with an article by Christel van Eck, an alumnus of the program I work for, albeit from way before my time. She is now an assistant professor of communication science at the University of Amsterdam specialized in climate change communication, and she published an article in npj Climate Action on the myth of neutrality in climate science.

The article is a rebuttal to an earlier article by Ulf Büntgen in the same journal. In a nutshell Büntgen argues that climate science and climate activism should be strictly separated because activism means value judgement and an interest in certain specific outcomes and scientists should not have “a priori interests the outcome of their studies.”

van Eck and her co-authors make two points in their article:

If a scientist didn’t have an interest in the outcome of their study, they wouldn’t be doing the study.
Values are interwoven into science and this is a good thing. Values dictate what we consider “good science” among others in terms of data collection and analysis methods.

They acknowledge that if political values result in the scientific method and norms being manipulated such that outcomes are aligned with the scientist’s ideology, such research and the scientists involved should be rejected, but they also point out that engaging in activism does NOT necessarily mean that scientists would be biased towards certain outcomes nor does it diminish the credibility of the science or scientist.

The reason why this article (and its predecessor) struck a chord with me is that it reminded me of a much older one on the challenges of doing conservation research in a multidisciplinary context that I had read before. It shows, to my mind, why the concern for separating science and advocacy is more important for the social scientist than the average natural scientist may realize:

“At many of the Costa Rican sea turtle nesting beaches where I work, natural scientists are members of and are supported by nongovernmental organizations that also advocate sea turtle conservation. Although they should be aware of the potential for their advocacy activities to influence how their research is perceived, it is possible for these scientists to perform an advocacy function without affecting their study group.

As a social scientist working on sea turtle conservation, my research involves measuring the social, political, cultural, and economic context of human interactions with sea turtles and assessing the impacts of conservation programs. My data source is most often the people living with sea turtles and, as a result, I cannot be a direct advocate for sea turtles, because such a stance would influence the way my research subjects—people—interact with me.”
Campbell, L.M. (2005). Overcoming Obstacles to Interdisciplinary Research. Conservation Biology, 19(2): 574-577. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2005.00058.x

What Campbell worries about is not so much that the research method or outcomes are consciously manipulated by the scientist to get a certain outcome, but that social scientists may get different outcomes in a study if they are known advocates. Their study subjects may respond differently to advocates than they would to scientists.

This problem is actually well-known in environmental economics, where we often try to estimate how people value the environment or other public goods. Although economists prefer to rely on observed behavior for this, sometimes there really is no way around asking people directly. If the interviewees believe that their answer will influence a policy outcome they may over- or understate their willingness to pay.

There are “tricks” to circumvent that problem. If the behavior is in an expected direction one can adjust the estimates by using an alternative statistical model. Another way is rather than asking people what they’re willing to pay you offer them discrete choices over scenarios associated with fixed different payments. This forces people to make a choice, and is probably the reason why these days discrete choice experiments are much more popular that contingent valuation methods.

And yet, by forcing people within a frame like that we may miss important information, or force people to answer differently then they would have if we were not advocates. To the best of my knowledge, there are no good solutions for this, one can just try and ask people to be truthful and trust their answers.

So again we are back at credibility and truthfulness. And then a blogpost of a former colleague of mine Rolf Groeneveld came along (in Dutch, here is an English translation thanks to Google translate). He starts from the observation that science is criticized in times of fake news and global crises as being out of touch with reality or biased because of their sponsors or political ideology. He then asks what science is paraphrasing Adam Frank: science is a method to arrive at the truth, nothing more and nothing less. He goes on to criticize that view because we cannot check everything and at some point we have to believe that previous work by others was carried out with integrity. The belief/trust aspect makes science an institution: it only exists if we believe in it.

So what do we believe? Do we have trust in scientists or science overall? That’s where the third article came in. Admittedly, it just popped-up in my LinkedIn feed, which either means that the algorithm of LinkedIn is better than I thought or it may have been a coincidence (I fear the former, but hope for the latter). In a worldwide study published in Nature Human Behaviour, Cologna and colleagues look at trust in scientists and correlates. On a five-point scale where 1 is very low and 5 is very high, the world average is still 3.62 with a standard deviation of 0.7, so while trust in scientists is not as high as it could be, it is certainly not low. Also there is no country in the sample where the average is low or very low (the minimum is 3.06 in Albania, the maximum 4.3 in Egypt, see Figure). If you want to explore the attitudes and correlates in your own country the project has a Shiny app where you can explore the data at country level in detail here.

Figure Caption: Total n = 69,527. Country ns range between 312 and 8,014 (see Supplementary Information for a detailed overview). The vertical line denotes the weighted grand mean. The horizontal lines indicate means ± standard errors. Country-level standard errors range between 0.008 and 0.133.

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

I guess that this means that things are not as bad as some people feared, but there is certainly work to do on the belief in trustworthiness of scientists. And of course as in any good social science topic the causality runs in two ways: social scientists have to have faith in their subjects (whoever said that natural science is harder than social science clearly misunderstood the intricacies involved in social interaction!)

Why it is important to believe in Truth, Integrity and other values we deem important is beautifully depicted by Terry Pratchett in his novel Hogfather. After having saved the Discworld equivalent of Father Christmas, Susan, Death’s grand daughter, asks him why he intervened and saved the Hogfather, someone that has to be believed in to exist:

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.”
Terry Pratchett. Hogfather