On Health and Jobs, Businesspeople Outrank Scientists on Credibility in a 6,198-Person Survey. On Tech, Scientists Win.

Imagine the task. A statement about a social issue, say health, education or employment, appears with a speaker attached: a university scientist. Another statement comes with a businessperson attached. Each participant judged eight of these combinations and rated how credible they found each. Across 6,198 completed surveys from the UK and Sweden, the speaker label moved the scores.

The study, published in Research Policy, found scientists rated above government officials but no higher than businesspeople or issue advocates. On questions about technology's effects on society, scientists pulled ahead. On health, education and employment, businesspeople and advocates came out ahead of them.

The doubts behind the gap

The researchers asked about three kinds of distrust. Do university scientists work too closely with vested interests? Are they driven by ideology instead of open-minded? Is their knowledge too far from the problems at hand? Thirty-seven percent said yes to the first, 37 percent to the second, and 33 percent to the third. In all, 56 percent of respondents agreed with at least one.

Those doubts tracked the credibility penalty, and they mattered most when scientists weighed in on non-technological topics. Among respondents with none of the three, the penalty for talking about health or employment instead of technology disappeared. That makes the finding narrower than the headline suggests. The gap is concentrated in people who already doubted scientists' independence, bias or relevance, according to the University of Manchester release.

The release reports the associations but not effect sizes, and it does not reproduce the statements respondents rated, so the size of the swing between a scientist label and a businessperson label is not visible from what is public. Respondents also rated attributed statements, not real people making real arguments. The design covers two countries and one online format.

Trust in science is a different question

Surveys that ask whether people trust science tend to return big numbers. The Pew Research Center found in January 2019 that 86 percent of 4,464 US adults had at least a fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public interest, and 35 percent had a great deal, up from 21 percent in 2016. Pew also reported a 16-point partisan gap on the great-deal measure, 43 percent of Democrats against 27 percent of Republicans.

Those are US numbers from a different question, so they cannot be set directly beside the new results. They do show why the two findings can both be true. A person can say scientists generally act in the public interest and still discount a particular scientist weighing in on school policy.

Professor Cornelia Lawson, who works at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research at Alliance Manchester Business School, framed it as an expectation problem. Scientists are increasingly asked to speak on big social questions, she said, and "this does not automatically translate into greater credibility."

The same team saw an early version of the pattern in a 2024 working paper, "Are scientists perceived as credible experts?", by Anders Broström of KTH, Lawson and Mabel Sanchez Barrioluengo. It reported that scientists carry relatively high credibility on positive predictions about new technology, while business actors and special interest groups are seen as more credible when the message about the future is negative.

What to take from it

One caveat on sourcing: the Research Policy paper itself sat behind a publisher block when checked, so this piece runs on the university release and phys.org coverage, which draws on the same release. The numbers above are the release's, not independently recomputed.

For a scientist commenting on employment or schooling, the practical reading is plain. In this experiment the scientist label bought no edge over a businessperson, and a clear one only over government officials. Where it did help, with technology, the same team's earlier work suggests the message was a hopeful one.