Experts can be our heroes in times of crisis
We just need to protect them from those who inaccurately sully their reputations
The environmental, health and consumer advocacy group U.S. PIRG has been around for nearly 50 years. It features policy wonks who, for decades, have been grappling with essential issues that face Americans. Nevertheless, even our smartest and most well-versed staff members recognize the limits of their knowledge and often seek out experts on specific subjects.
That was the case recently when we called for a reasoned and on-point plan for COVID-19 testing. In that situation, we looked to former U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner David Kessler. Given his specific experience in this field, we listened when he laid out a four-point plan to address the lack of testing available in the United States, and we subsequently made it a cornerstone of our advocacy work on COVID-19.
The novel coronavirus presents a public health danger of epic proportions. More than ever, we need to seek out and trust experts. The risk caused by not listening to those who have spent their professional lives preparing for moments such as these could be catastrophic.
And, yet, this pandemic comes during a pocket of time when public trust in experts has diminished. According to a 2017 poll, the amount of people who said “not at all” when asked whether they trusted scientists increased more than 50 percent compared to the same poll in 2013. The same survey also found that only 35 percent of those asked said they trusted scientists “a lot,” according to Scientific American.
Admittedly, America has a long history of this type of skepticism. Experts, who are often branded as cultural elites, can advocate for the type of paradigm shifts that require broad societal changes. While these transformations can be necessary, they can also cause losses — and understandable resentment — for some. That said, the resulting anger is not always rational. As Isaac Asimov wrote in 1980: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
With all that in mind, we need to understand the ways experts are undercut.
In 2015, a team from the University of Muenster in Germany looked into what it takes for the public to embrace experts. The researchers used the term “epistemic trustworthiness” to describe the three key characteristics necessary for experts to earn the public’s trust: “expertise, integrity and benevolence,” The Independent in Great Britain reported.
Climate science offers a prime example of how people can attack these qualities. This is best reflected by the efforts of global warming deniers to debunk scientist Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph. Simply put, the chart shows how humans are impacting the rise in global warming. To throw Mann’s work into question, disbelievers began publicizing hacked emails that allegedly proved scientists were cooking up numbers (goodbye, integrity) to malevolently boost their position (adios, benevolence).
Ultimately, these assertions, dubbed Climategate, were debunked. “Climate deniers threw everything they had at the hockey stick,” The Atlantic explained. “They focused immense resources on what they thought was the Achilles Heel of global warming research — and even then, they couldn’t hobble it.”
While they were unable to dent the graph’s scientific basis, the accusations did chip away at the experts’ standing for a time. Five weeks after Climategate, a poll by Yale and George Mason universities saw the percentage of people who believed that the planet was warming drop from 71 percent to 57 percent, according to the magazine Mother Jones. (Thankfully, in January 2020, the same poll found that the number of people who have some form of concern about global warming was back up to 73 percent.)
Frighteningly, when it comes to COVID-19, some politicians are questioning the benevolence of experts by implying they don’t have their priorities straight. Rather than self-quarantine, which doctors are recommending, these naysayers, such as Texas’ Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, have suggested we need to prioritize the economy as much as the well-being of citizens. “Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves,” Patrick said on Fox News. “But don’t sacrifice the country” and its economy by staying locked down. In other words, medical experts who say otherwise don’t have America’s best interests in mind.
Commentator Rush Limbaugh went even further, questioning the expertise and the integrity of health care professionals. “We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know,” he said on his syndicated March 27 radio show. “And how do we know they’re even health experts? … [H]as there been any job assessment for them?”
In times like these, we must push back at these sorts of assertions because listening to experts is not only important in solving this pandemic but is also essential in preventing other catastrophes, such as climate change. By robustly backing doctors now, we place a marker down to support scientific expertise down the road.
“Hopefully, reliance on science-based health measures will now guide the country’s approach to combating coronavirus,” former Environmental Protection Agency official Margo Oge recently said in Forbes. “And, while the world awaits the worst yet to come in the coronavirus infections and deaths, the lessons from this pandemic could result in an approach to bi-partisan, scientifically driven commitment to combat climate change.”
Of course, this is not a for-sure proposition. As the likes of Texas’ lieutenant governor and Limbaugh have shown, there will be COVID-19 pushback. Moreover, work must still be done to get everyone on the same page about the clear scientific consensus on climate change. You need look no further than the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to limit the consideration of scientific studies to see this problem.
With that in mind, if Oge’s hopes do not prove true, and politicians brush aside experts now with the pandemic — or in the future with global warming — we must remember the epistemic trustworthiness characteristics: expertise, integrity and benevolence. From there, we are duty-bound to fight any efforts to unfairly tarnish the reputations of those experts who are seeking to save lives. Because, especially in dangerous times, experts can be our heroes.
