Does Engagement in Advocacy Hurt the Credibility of Scientists? Results from a Randomized National Survey Experiment
By J. Kotcher, Teresa A. Myers, Emily K. Vraga, Neil Stenhouse, Edward Maibach. 2017
168 citations recorded by the source corpus.
ABSTRACT It is often assumed that issue advocacy will compromise the credibility of scientists. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment to test public reactions to six different advocacy statements made by a scientist—ranging from a purely informational statement to an endorsement of specific policies. We found that perceived credibility of the communicating scientist was uniformly high in five of the six message conditions, suffering only when he advocated for a specific policy—building more nuclear power plants (although credibility did not suffer when advocating for a different specific policy—carbon dioxide limits at power plants). We also found no significant differences in trust in the broader climate science community between the six message conditions. Our results suggest that climate scientists who wish to engage in certain forms of advocacy have considerable latitude to do so without risking harm to their credibility, or the credibility of the scientific community.
Subfields: Communication, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f294a3da1e42d3cd071dc22fdb0ede8e9261eb1a
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In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Reassessing the Variables Used to Measure Public Perceptions of Scientists (2020, background): “Others rely on McCroskey and Teven’s (1999) conceptualization of goodwill that includes dimensions of competence, expertise, honesty, and concern (e.g., Kotcher et al., 2017).”