The science believers who hold scientific conspiracy theories

A person who says they trust science can also believe that vaccines cause hidden side-effects, that 5G masts are a public-health experiment, and that the Apollo landings were filmed in a hangar. The juxtaposition sounds absurd until you look at the polling. The two stances are not opposites. They often arrive together.

That is the puzzle a pair of researchers set out to measure, and the finding cuts against a tidy story in which a sceptical public has simply lost faith in expertise. Trust in science has held up better than trust in most other institutions, even as belief in scientific conspiracy theories has climbed. The pattern, they argue, is less a contradiction than an ideology doing the sorting. People who reject mainstream science by default are the ones most likely to add conspiracy explanations; people who already accept mainstream science are not.

What the data show

The work, summarised in Physics World on 20 July 2026, draws on a 2022 survey of American adults asked both whether they had confidence in science and whether they endorsed a battery of scientific conspiracy theories, including the claim that vaccine side-effects are being hushed up and that contrails are chemically harmful. The two items correlate, but not in the direction a simple "decline of trust" narrative would predict. Strong belief in conspiracy ideas runs alongside, not against, strong support for science. The respondents reading most like defenders of the scientific method were also the least likely to buy the alternative explanations.

What appears at first glance to be a paradox collapses once the variable is reframed. The pattern is not about trust or distrust. It is about a worldview in which a uniform suspicion of official accounts, including scientific ones, absorbs both confidence in everyday researchers and belief in a hidden order behind the science.

How to read the same headline

Two readings of the result are consistent with the evidence, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is reassuring. People who trust science mostly still trust it. Confidence in research is not the same category as belief in underground science. If researchers want to communicate with the vaccine hesitant, the polarising claim that they have "lost faith in science" is empirically wrong on the survey evidence. They never had the kind of faith that mainstream science criticism assumed.

The second is less comfortable. The small but consistent overlap between trust and conspiracy belief suggests that, for a slice of the public, mainstream science and fringe science are not opposed pillars. Both belong to a single category of esoteric knowledge that the holder feels they possess. The work to dislodge one false claim risks reinforcing the relationship that supports the others.

A sensible read of the data sits between these two. Public confidence in science is real, broad, and worth defending on its own terms. The conspiracy theories that worry communicators the most are a different object, with different drivers, and they do not respond to the same interventions.

Why the gap exists

The two stances look similar from the outside but operate on different mechanisms. Trust in science is institutional. It depends on perceived independence, peer review, the slow accumulation of evidence. Belief in a conspiracy is oppositional. It is sustained by a sense that the surface story is wrong and that the believer has access to the right one. These are not different points on a single axis. They are different questions, and the answers do not have to line up.

Work on vaccine hesitancy and on climate-change denial over the last decade has consistently shown that the strongest predictor of rejecting a scientific consensus is not low scientific literacy. It is the political and cultural alignment of the message. When a finding is coded as belonging to an out-group, the messenger, however qualified, gets discounted along with the finding. The present study is consistent with that body of work without endorsing any single interpretation of it.

The structural upshot is that information campaigns calibrated for the median reader will fail the median conspiracy believer, and vice versa. Different interventions apply.

What communicators can do

Three implications follow, none of them novel but all of them sharpened by the survey evidence.

First, do not assume trust travels with detail. Recipients do not always absorb new evidence as evidence. They absorb it through the prism of which side is delivering it. Repeating the official finding more loudly can harden the rejection it is meant to soften.

Second, treat the conspiracy believer as a member of an interpretive community, not as a confused individual. Recruit the trusted interlocutor, whether a local clinician, a faith leader, or a peer, rather than the institutional spokesperson. The credibility that matters in this setting is local.

Third, separate the work of defending confidence in mainstream science from the work of dislodging specific false claims. The two efforts are not in tension, but they target different audiences and they rely on different skills. A science communicator explaining the safety record of mRNA vaccines is not automatically well placed to address the wider belief that the medical system is hiding its mistakes.

What remains uncertain

The survey is American, drawn from 2022 responses, and the researchers are explicit that similar instruments in other countries would test, rather than confirm, the same pattern. The mechanism behind the correlation is inferred from the structure of the answers, not from a controlled experiment, and the literature on motivated reasoning offers multiple ways to arrive at the observed result. The sources do not specify whether the overlap has widened or narrowed over the last decade, only that it is detectable in the present sample.

The implication for science journalism is modest. The story that trust in science is collapsing sells better than the truer one, which is that trust in mainstream science is being redistributed rather than eroded. The conspiracy theories remain. The audience for serious science reporting remains. They are not the same audience, and they will not respond to the same pitch.

Desk note: The wire treatment of this study emphasised the apparent paradox and stopped there. Monexus read the same evidence and read it as a story about two different audiences that should not be addressed as one.