The POIESIS recommendations on the impact of “chains of mediation” on public trust in science are here!!

Over the last few years, the POIESIS research team ran a series of engagement events addressing researchers, journalists, science communicators, institutional ethics officers, and citizens. Through 7 Public Deliberative Workshops, 119 Expert Interviews and a Survey Experiment involving 2847 participants, POIESIS focused on how different types of scientific communicators translate scientific information into various public domains and to different audiences (translation processes which we describe as “chains of mediation”).

Deliverable D2.5: Cultivating chains of mediation to foster trust in science describes in more detail this process and our main recommendations which could be summarised as follows:

• Research integrity practices tend to be indirectly inferred or embedded in the work that mediators provide to their audiences. At the same time, some mediators, particularly specialist science journalists, are important actors in exposing actual integrity or ethical problems in science and view this as a vital part of their professional role and their contribution to the public good.
• Closer to science, researchers and institutional ethics officers place greater emphasis on the importance of community norms and the formal procedures and processes that foster integrity and ethics in science. The outputs of their work may not always be shared directly with the public. However, they often do provide information and inputs to the work of mediators
• While the public seemingly recognizes the value of good research practices and are more trusting when research integrity and societal integration is secured, such practices should not be mistaken for a silver bullet for mediators or institutional actors trying to handle public (mis)trust of science.
• While greater public engagement can be beneficial, the desirable extent of citizen 16 involvement as well as the suitable topics that citizens can meaningfully contribute to, needs consideration.
• Chains of mediation should base their communication in scientific values, rigour of the scientific process and quality.
• Specific conditions call for specific forms of communication and/or dialogue, and the degree to which mediators can play a role as builders or maintainers of trust in science is clearly different across cases and contexts.

Those recommendations, along with the findings of the secondary data analysis on public trust in science provided on POIESIS D1.5: Integrity, Integration, and Institutions for Trust: Reflections Based on Secondary Data Sources, and the recommendations provided from the rest of the projects’ engagement activities on POIESIS D3.4:  How can institutions promote responsible research to enhance trust in science: An analytical aide memoire towards recommendations for maintaining trust will be used as an input for the POIESIS Scenario Workshop (mid-May 2025, Brussels) which will co-create with stakeholders, with a focus on policy makers, the final POIESIS policy recommendations for tackling societal mistrust in science and for strengthening the co-creation of R&I contents by society. You can easily download all those documents here!