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The COVID-19 pandemic and global climate change crisis remind us that widespread trust in the products of the scientific enterprise is vital to the health and safety of the global community. Insofar as appropriate responses to these (and other) crises require us to trust that enterprise, cultivating a healthier trust relationship between science and the public may be considered as a collective public good. While it might appear that scientists can contribute to this good by taking more initiative to communicate their work to public audiences, we raise a concern about unintended consequences of an individualistic approach to such communication. 

Significant gaps remain between public opinion and the scientific consensus on many issues. We present the results of three studies ( N = 722 in total) for the development and testing of a novel instrument to measure a largely unmeasured aspect of scientific literacy: the enterprise of science, particularly in the context of its social structures. We posit that this understanding of the scientific enterprise is an important source for the public’s trust in science. Our results indicate that the Social Enterprise of Science Index (SESI) is a reliable and valid instrument that correlates positively with trust in science ( r = .256, p < .001), and level of education ( r = .245, p < .001). We also develop and validate a six question short version of the SESI for ease of use in longer surveys. 

Efforts to cultivate scientific literacy in the public are often aimed at enabling people to make more informed decisions — both in their own lives (e.g., personal health, sustainable practices, &c.) and in the public sphere. Implicit in such efforts is the cultivation of some measure oftrustof science. To what extent does science reporting in mainstream newspapers contribute to these goals? Is what is reported likely to improve the public's understanding of science as a process for generating reliable knowledge? What are its likely effects on public trust of science? In this paper, we describe a content analysis of 163 instances of science reporting in three prominent newspapers from three years in the last decade. The dominant focus, we found, was on particular outcomes of cutting-edge science; it was comparatively rare for articles to attend to the methodology or the social–institutional processes by which particular results come about. At best, we argue that this represents a missed opportunity. 

The scientific community, we hold, often provides society with knowledge — that the HIV virus causes AIDS, that anthropogenic climate change is underway, that the MMR vaccine is safe. Some deny that we have this knowledge, however, and work to undermine it in others. It has been common (but not uncontroversial) to refer to such agents as “denialists”. At first glance, then, denialism appears to be a form of skepticism. But while we know that various denialist strategies for suppressing belief are generally effective, little is known about which strategies are most effective. We see this as an important first step toward their remediation. This paper leverages the approximate comparison to various forms of philosophical skepticism to design an experimental test of the efficacy of four broad strategies of denial at suppressing belief in specific scientific claims. Our results suggest that assertive strategies are more effective at suppressing belief than questioning strategies.