During the COVID-19 pandemic a refrain often heard was “trust the science” or its twin “that is settled science”. I always found the statements puzzling, because science is a means of inquiry and not something that you should take on faith. If you think about it, what does trust the science really mean other than a political statement that someone should accept a position because it had science behind it. It was a claim based on authority masquerading as a claim based on science.
The Scientific Process
Science is nothing more than a systematic way of learning about the world. We take structured observations in such a way that we can determine if things are related, or we can find out what happens if we do something. For example, if we boil a certain amount of sugar in a certain amount of water and let it cool, it will crystalize and we have rock candy. This seems obvious when we are dealing with simple physical things that can be observed, and in this case tasted. But not all things we study can be directly observed. As a psychologist, most of what I study has to do with people’s thoughts and feelings. I can’t see employee burnout or engagement. I have to infer them, so if I find in a survey that people who say they are burned out say they are not engaged, I cannot be absolutely certain that engagement and burnout are really connected. There can be a variety of reasons that the two are related within a survey.
There are mechanisms within science to helps us gain confidence in our findings and our interpretations.
- Reliability. We repeat our study multiple times to see if we get the same results. I survey people from 5 companies and in each case engagement and burnout are related.
- Independent Replication. My study of engagement and burnout is replicated by a team with no connection to me. This rules out potential biases and errors on my part, and is a check that I didn’t use questionable research practices or outright fraud.
- Converging Operations. In science this means using more than one method to study something. Instead of relying on employee surveys, I try other methods. For example, I send trained observers to watch employees work to look for signs of engagement and burnout.
- Tests of Alternative Explanations. I consider if there are other mechanisms that can explain my findings. For a survey study, there is the possibility of common method bias (or variance) that explains my results. Maybe people strive to be consistent in their answers regardless of the reality. Maybe I had poor measures where the burnout measure is really measuring engagement.
What Does Trust the Science Really Mean?
From a scientific perspective, “trust the science” doesn’t mean very much. Sometimes people say it to claim that there is consensus among scientists. Consensus alone is hardly evidence. At one time there was consensus that the Sun orbited the Earth rather than the opposite. Consensus can be misleading because scientists are people who are subject to group-think like everyone else, which can lead them to go along with what others seem to believe. Those with a publish or perish existence are likely to toe the line when it comes to theories and methods because the discovery of “truth” takes second place to the need to publish. To maximize publication chances, most people are careful to study the right topics and come to the right conclusions. Studying a politically charged topic like COVID-19 during the pandemic just increases the pressures.
To my mind a better phase than “trust the science” would be “what’s the evidence for that”? By asking a question, you invite thoughtful deliberation and discussion. You encourage someone to think about their position and look for evidence to convince you that they are correct. That search is what science is all about–finding evidence upon which to base a conclusion. We come at a problem with curiosity and openness to whatever the evidence tells us. What does trust the science really mean other than I am making a claim based on authority. This is not how science works–we make claims based on evidence.
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