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. 2023 Sep 19;120(38):e2213838120.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.2213838120. Epub 2023 Sep 11.

Factors Assessing Science's Self-Presentation model and their effect on conservatives' and liberals' support for funding science

Yotam Ophir  1 , Dror Walter  2 , Patrick E Jamieson  3 , Kathleen Hall Jamieson  3
Affiliations

Factors Assessing Science's Self-Presentation model and their effect on conservatives' and liberals' support for funding science

Yotam Ophir et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of responses to 13 questions from a 2022 national probability sample of 1,154 US adults supported the existence of five factors that we argue assess perceptions of Factors Assessing Science's Self-Presentation (FASS). These factors also predict support for increasing federal funding of science and, separately, supporting federal funding of basic research. Each of the factors reflects perceptions of a key facet of scientists' self-presentation, science/scientists' adherence to professed norms, or science's benefits: specifically, that scientists are Credible, Prudent, and Unbiased and that science is Self-Correcting and Beneficial. The FASS model explained 40.6% of the variance in support for increasing federal funding for science and 33.7% in support for basic research. For both dependent variables, conservatives were less likely to be supportive when they perceived that science/scientists fail to overcome biases. The interactions between political ideology and both Prudence and Beneficial, however, were significant only when predicting Basic Research support. In that case, there were no differences between conservatives and liberals when perceptions of benefit were low, but when high, liberals' perception of benefit had a stronger association with support for funding than conservatives'. Among those perceiving that scientists lack prudence, liberals were more likely to support funding basic research than conservatives, but the difference disappeared when perceptions of prudence were very high. The factors could serve as across-time indicators of the public's assessment of the state of science.

Keywords: communicating science; funding basic research; funding science; scientific norms; self-presentation of science.

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Conflict of interest statement

K.H.J. coordinated the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands retreat chaired by Subra Suresh, former director of the NSF, and Robert A. Bradway, the chair and CEO of Amgen, which played a role in creation of the CEOs Defend Basic Research project. The Wall Street Journal ad referenced in this paper was funded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which K.H.J. directs. K.H.J. has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center since 1993 and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication (2017) and The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication (2017). M.S. and M.C.N. each coauthored one of the 47 chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication (2017). M.C.N. received a $1,000 honorarium for participating in the 2014 conference that planned The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication volume, $1,000 in 2016 for submitting the first draft of his co-authored chapter and $500 in 2017 after submitting the revised final draft of that chapter and editing the chapter of one of the other contributors. He received $2,500 for an invited lecture at APPC in 2018. M.S. received $1,528 in 2017 for coauthoring his handbook chapter and editing the chapter of another contributor. P.M. is the coauthor of one of the 62 chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication (2017). For co-authoring the chapter, P.M. received $1,500 in 2011. The Handbook’s publication was delayed until 2017.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Conceptual diagram of the FASS model and their predicted relationships with ideology and support for funding.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Interaction between ideology and perceived-Unbiased on support for federal funding.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Interaction between ideology and perceived-Unbiased (Left), Beneficial (Center), and Prudent (Right) on support for Basic Research funding.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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