Alienation and Trust in Climate Scientists in the US

Abstract

Trust in climate scientists is declining and deeply polarized in the United States. Prominent psychological accounts attribute distrust to cognitive deficiencies — lack of knowledge, motivated reasoning, or conspiracist thinking — treating distrust as a product of individual irrationality. We test an alternative: the alienation model of science distrust, which holds that distrust stems from structural exclusion from science rather than individual cognitive failings. People who are structurally excluded from science — institutionally, socially, geographically, or informationally — will be more likely to feel alienated from science, and therefore more likely to distrust scientists. This distrust may be rational: those who are structurally excluded from an institution have less influence over its decisions, which increases their vulnerability and may warrant greater wariness. We derive and test specific individual-level predictions of the alienation model using data from a large, nationally representative US sample (N ≈ 22,000). All analyses are correlational, and all hypotheses and analytical procedures are pre-registered prior to data collection.