Trust in science is high, but belief in conspiracy theories climbs alongside it
A new paper finds that the same people who say they trust scientists are also the ones most likely to entertain scientific conspiracy theories. The result exposes the limits of trust as a single barometer for evidence-based reasoning.
On 20 July 2026, a study published in the journal Public Understanding of Science reported an apparent contradiction at the heart of how publics reason about science: respondents who expressed the highest general confidence in scientists were also, in many cases, the same respondents most willing to entertain specific scientific conspiracy theories, from claims that vaccine side effects are being hushed up to assertions that contrails are chemical agents dispersed over populations.
The finding lands in an unusual political moment. Confidence in most major Western institutions has slipped year over year across much of the past decade, while trust in science itself has held up comparatively well in repeated cross-country surveys. The new paper suggests that the aggregate figure masks a more textured picture. People who say they trust science, the authors argue, are not necessarily applying scientific reasoning when they evaluate individual claims.
What the survey actually found
The research, summarised by the outlet Medical Xpress on 20 July 2026, drew on a representative survey of adults in one Western European country. The team asked respondents both a general trust-in-science battery and a separate set of items measuring agreement with a list of scientific conspiracy theories. The two measures did not behave as a simple opposition. A substantial subset of respondents scored high on trust and high on at least one conspiracy belief.
The pattern was most pronounced for theories that touched directly on personal or family exposure: claims about hidden vaccine harms, suppressed cancer cures, and the deliberate spreading of disease through travel networks. Theories about the origins of COVID-19 and about weather modification also clustered in this group. Theories perceived as more remote from everyday life, including some cosmological fringe claims, drew less traction from high-trust respondents.
The authors describe this as evidence that general trust in science is, in practice, something other than a reliable proxy for scientific literacy or for adherence to the methods by which scientific consensus is built. Two people can both say "I trust scientists," and disagree sharply on which scientific claims to believe.
The limits of "trust" as a barometer
The result exposes a measurement problem that has nagged science-communication research for years. Headline survey items ask whether respondents trust scientists, or trust scientific findings, or believe that science benefits them. These are blunt instruments. They collapse several different judgments: trust in the institutional process, trust in specific findings, trust in the people who deliver them, and trust in the broader cultural authority of expertise.
The new paper does not claim that everyone who holds a conspiracy belief is a hypocrite. It claims something more structural: that a high score on a general trust measure can coexist with low tolerance for individual findings that cut against a respondent's pre-existing commitments. A person who trusts their family doctor may still believe that their doctor is being lied to by a higher authority. A person who trusts climate science may still believe that weather events in their own region are being engineered.
This is the terrain that earlier public-opinion work has struggled to map. Past studies have shown that conspiracy beliefs correlate more strongly with feelings of powerlessness, with low trust in political institutions, and with heavy use of partisan media than with measured scientific knowledge. The new contribution is to show that science-specific trust does not inoculate against these dynamics when the specific claim in question touches identity, parenthood, health, or suspicion of authority.
What the structural picture looks like
Read against the broader media environment, the result is unsurprising. The same algorithmic feeds that surface authoritative vaccine guidance also surface video essays alleging that the guidance is corrupt. The same newsroom brands that publish peer-reviewed summaries also publish celebrity interviews questioning peer review. Audiences have learned to navigate these inputs selectively, often without any consistent method.
For institutional science communicators, the implication is uncomfortable. Campaigns that treat declining trust as the disease, and that aim to rebuild it through clearer messaging or more charismatic spokespeople, may be operating on the wrong variable. The respondents who need convincing are not necessarily those with low trust; many are high-trust respondents who have simply placed a different boundary between trust and belief. A more granular strategy, distinguishing between institutional trust, methodological literacy, and disposition toward uncertainty, would cost more and yield less dramatic survey numbers.
The structural question is whether the platforms that distribute both authoritative science and conspiracy content have any incentive to act on this distinction. Under current attention-economy logic, both kinds of content perform; both reach the same users; both generate the engagement that funds the recommendation systems. Public-health agencies cannot easily outcompete this on volume.
What is still contested
The paper is based on a single-country sample, and the authors are cautious about generalising. Replication in jurisdictions with different media diets, different relationships between political identity and vaccine uptake, and different histories of state-led scientific controversies will be necessary before the pattern can be treated as universal. The authors also acknowledge that their conspiracy-battery items overlap in places with positions that are contested but not fringe, including some COVID-origin hypotheses that remain in active scientific dispute.
What the sources do not specify, and what the paper does not resolve, is whether the same pattern would appear among respondents with formal scientific training. Earlier work suggests that higher education sharpens but does not eliminate conspiratorial reasoning, particularly on topics where respondents feel personal stakes. The new study does not directly test that, and any inference here would outrun the evidence.
The honest read is that trust in science, as currently measured, is a less precise instrument than the headlines suggest. It captures something real about respondents' relationship to expertise. It does not, on its own, predict how that relationship will hold up when a specific claim lands close to home.
This piece reports on a single peer-reviewed study as summarised by a science-news outlet; it does not generalise beyond the surveyed population and should be read alongside the original paper.