A new survey took a premise that is casually accepted by the university sector - that conservatives' trust in science has eroded - and goes beyond the usual claim that trust has eroded because American conservatives are less scientific.

Trust in science has eroded among conservatives...but it has also eroded among progressives. Only a narrow band of self-identifying liberals maintains the same level of confidence in science as they did 40 years ago. And 40 years ago conservatives had the most trust of all.(1) 

Not so today. While the humanities had been co-opted by political liberalism starting after World War II it was only in the 1970s that they began to outpace political conservatives in the science buildings. By the 1990s the shift was clear and today only 6 percent of fields like biology have diversity when it comes to political beliefs.(2)

The left-right divide exists in trust in science because the left-right divide is openly expressed by scientists

But  when it comes to trust in science it is important to look at it the way you should hazard versus risk in chemicals, or absolutely versus relative risk swimming in the ocean. Though conservatives trust in academic science less than liberals, American trust in science is not bad, it's excellent. A recent survey found that 86 percent of people had a reasonable amount of trust in scientists while at the high end 15 percent of Democrats and 10 percent of Republicans have a "great deal" of confidence in science. It's only when you get into specific areas of science you find clear political divides that correspond to declines in trust - Republicans are more likely to distrust climate science and evolution while Democrats are more distrustful of food, energy and medical sciences.

So confidence exists in the public but it is not there among politicians. In America to some extent, but certainly in Europe, as scientists have insisted they need to be more political, the gap between policymaking and evidence has widened. Republican legislators are going to assume the worst about the motivations of climate scientists just like the left in Europe does about food and chemicals. Their reasoning is not awful; why trust experts on Brexit or climate change when so many academics promote environmental groups whose beliefs are not grounded in science?

Finding common ground based on common science we all accept

That people distrust issues they regard as politicized, like GMOs or global warming, while maintaining overall confidence actually speaks well for Americans.  And that can be increase confidence in all areas of science, which will force policymakers to embrace experts.

What might improve it? Reminding people about the science they already accept. 

A new survey presented during the annual American Psychological Association convention set out to see how to create more common ground and it tackled climate change because that gets a lot more press coverage. The New York Times and Guardian aren't noting there is denial of science about agriculture, for example, they even promote it, but with climate science they are willing to believe. Lots of science is complex, which means it is easy to be tripped up for teachers who are not great in their understanding or for Facebook groups to undermine it,(3) so it is reasonable to infer that a tactic in one area will work in others.

https://www.sciencecodex.com/climate-change-conversations-can-be-difficu...

NOTES:

(1) The reasons for the switch may be obvious in hindsight. As academia became a high-paying job, thanks to increased government funding beginning in the 1980s, it began to be taken over by people who ordinarily would have gone into the private sector for money and who like more government. In the U.S. that is going to be our version of "liberals." Meanwhile, conservatives and progressives, who see slippery slopes in lots of places, regarded academia as a takeover by the left. Trust began to decline by both those groups. 

It's understandable why conservatives would grow distrustful of a group that began to exclude them from its payrolls but why progressives? As FOIA documents show, in strategy emails between environmentalists, trade groups, journalism academics such as at UC San Francisco and the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and politically allied media outlets, they conspire to swarm and promote each other and tear down scientists all of the time. They rationalize that behavior by insisting the other side must be doing it also, and their bias manifests in loss of trust even for scientists on their own side.

(2) For social fields like psychology and anthropology it is even less diverse, with a scant 1 percent admitting to being a political conservative. 

(3) Evolution is complex, for example, so I once posited whether or not it might be better to move it to college instead of high school. Evolutionary biologists were not on board but we teach anatomy in high school, not brain surgery, and we teach Newton to all students but not Heisenberg. No one denies genetics but we saw how easily misunderstanding of natural selection was turned into eugenics by progressives a century ago.