About: Amidst measles outbreaks, climate denials, and other run-ins between established science and populist rejections, there is a great fear of misinformation and science populism rumbling in the present, as if trust in science is a safety bolt whose removal opens the flood gates to a wider erosion of liberal democracy. This talk presents some key results from the comparative, mixed-methods research project ‘REACTOR’, which uses quantitative and qualitative data from Europe and the US to study what makes lay citizens accept, resist or ignore expertise, whether it comes from their doctor, from science and professional experts more broadly, or from government institutions. The project combines quantitative approaches from political psychology with qualitative and interpretive approaches from the sociology of knowledge, expertise and professions.
Speaker: Lars Thorup Larsen, Associate Professor, PhD, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark, currently Visiting Researcher at SPPGA, UBC
