From 2020 to 2023, the PERITIA team produced research outputs to investigate the conditions under which people trust expertise used for informing public policy. This page compiles their research publications produced within the project.

  • Governing Trust in European Platform Societies

José van Dijck

Introduction to the special issue of the European Journal of Communication 2021, Vol. 36(4) 323–323.

For the past 20 years, digital platforms have created enormous wealth for companies and
convenient benefits for users as they enabled global online connections. But they have
also generated a variety of problems for users and societies[…]

  • Betrayal, Trust and Loyalty

Rowland Stout

I argue that while every betrayal is a breach of trust, not every breach of trust is a betrayal. I defend a conception of trust as primarily a feature of behaviour (i.e. trusting behaviour) and only secondarily a feature of a mental attitude[…]

  • Scepticism and the Value of Distrust

Maria Baghramian & Silvia Caprioglio Panizza

Faced with urgent calls for more trust in experts, especially in high impact and politically sensitive domains, such as climate science and COVID-19, the […]

  • Climate Communication: How Researchers Navigate between Scientific Truth and Media Publics

Donya Alinejad & José van Dijck

Recent attacks on scientific authority have intensified calls for climate scientists to seek out a more active stake in public […]

  • A New Dark Age? Truth, Trust, and Environmental Science

Torbjørn Gundersen, Donya Alinejad, T.Y. Branch, Bobby Duffy, Kirstie Hewlett, Cathrine Holst, Susan Owens, Folco Panizza, Silje Maria Tellmann, José van Dijck, and Maria Baghramian

This review examines the alleged crisis of trust in environmental science and its impact on public opinion, policy decisions in the context of democratic governance, and the interaction between science and society. […]

  • Special Issue: Social Indicators of Trust in Experts and Institutions

T.Y. Branch & Gloria Origgi

Social Epistemology, Volume 36, Issue 5 (2022)

  • Social Indicators of Trust in the Age of Informational Chaos

T.Y. Branch & Gloria Origgi

Expert knowledge regularly informs personal and civic-decision making. To decide which experts to trust, lay publics —including policymakers and experts from other domains—use different epistemic and non-epistemic cues[…]

  • The Social Indicators of the Reputation of an Expert

Gloria Origgi

A notion that comes from the toolbox of social sciences, trust has become a mainstream epistemological concept in the last 15 years. The notion of epistemic trust has been distinguished from the notion of moral and social trust, […]

  • Knowledge Brokers in Crisis: Public Communication of Science During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Carlo Martini, Davide Battisti, Federico Bina & Monica Consolandi

Knowledge brokers are among the main channels of communication between scientists and the public and a key element to establishing a relation of trust between the two. But translating knowledge from the scientific community […]

  • Science Advice in an Environment of Trust: Trusted, but Not Trustworthy?

Torbjørn Gundersen & Cathrine Holst

This paper examines the conditions of trustworthy science advice mechanisms, in which scientists have a mandated role to inform public policymaking. Based on the literature on epistemic trust and public trust in science, we argue that possession of relevant […]

  • Enhanced Epistemic Trust and the Value-Free Ideal as a Social Indicator of Trust

T.Y. Branch

Publics trust experts for personal and pro-social reasons. Scientists are among the experts publics trust most, and so, epistemic trust is routinely afforded to them. The call for epistemic trust to be more socially situated in order to account for the impact of science […]

  • On Testimonial Knowledge and its Functions

Michel Croce

The problem of explaining how we acquire knowledge via testimony gives rise to a dilemma, according to which any theory must make testimonial knowledge either too hard or too easy, and therefore no adequate account […]

  • Protect Others to Protect Myself: A Weakness of Western Countries in the Face of Current and Future Pandemics? Psychological and Neuroscientific Perspectives

Tiffany Morisseau & Martial Mermillod

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated a large number of publications in the medical and biological fields concerning the virus and its treatments, as well as in psychology, social sciences, and data sciences […]

  • Conceptual Domination

Matthew Shields

Implicit in much of the recent literature on conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics is the assumption that when speakers argue that we should talk or think about a concept in a specific way, they are doing so as inquirers […]

  • The Epistemology of Disagreement

Michel Croce

Article Summary. The epistemology of disagreement studies the epistemically relevant aspects of the interaction between parties who hold diverging opinions about a given subject matter […]

  • Countering Vaccine Hesitancy through Medical Expert Endorsement

Piero Ronzani, Folco Panizza, Carlo Martini, Lucia Savadori & Matteo Motterlini

Scientists and medical experts are among the professionals trusted the most. Are they also the most suitable figures to convince the general public to get vaccinated? […]

  • Survey Results: Public attitudes towards the COVID-19 pandemic

The Policy Institute, King’s College London

Negative feelings about national governments and the European Commission are general among six surveyed European countries and stand in strong contrast to the positive feelings expressed towards scientists. […]

  • Why Trust Raoult? How Social Indicators Inform the Reputations of Experts

Ty Branch, Gloria Origgi and Tiffany Morisseau

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the considerable challenge of sourcing expertise and determining which experts to trust. Dissonant information fostered controversy in public discourse […]

  • Lateral Reading and Monetary Incentives to Spot Disinformation about Science

Folco Panizza, Piero Ronzani, Carlo Martini, Simone Mattavelli, Tiffany Morisseau & Matteo Motterlini

Disinformation about science can impose enormous economic and public health burdens. A recently proposed strategy […]

  • Themes from Testimonial Injustice and Trust: Special Issue

Melanie Altanian & Maria Baghramian

Testimony has a specific epistemological vulnerability problem: What we come to know and understand is highly dependent on the cognitive labour and epistemic contributions of others. However, to form our beliefs merely on the grounds of a speaker’s […]

  • Deplatformization and the Governance of the Platform Ecosystem

José van Dijck, Tim de Winkel, Mirko Tobias Schäfer

This article analyzes deplatformization as an implied governance strategy by major tech companies to detoxify the platform ecosystem of radical content while […]

  • Stakes of Knowing the Truth: A Motivational Perspective on the Popularity of a Controversial Scientific Theory

Tiffany Morisseau, Ty Branch & Gloria Origgi

The aim of this article is to provide a different perspective on people’s beliefs regarding controversial scientific information. We emphasize that, although people generally […]

  • Governing Trust in European Platform Societies: Special Issue

José van Dijck

Volume 36 Issue 4, August 2021
Special Issue: Governing trust in European platform societies[…]

  • Recognition, Vulnerability and Trust

Danielle Petherbridge

This paper examines the question of whether recognition relations are based on trust. Theorists of recognition have acknowledged the ways in which recognition relations make us vulnerable to others but have largely neglected […]

  • Vulnerability and Trust: Special Issue

Maria Baghramian, Danielle Petherbridge, Rowland Stout

Annette Baier (Citation1986, 235) famously argued that a distinguishing mark of trust, as opposed to mere reliance and other attitudes in its neighbourhood, is that to trust is to accept vulnerability to another’s will […]

  • Social Media and Trust in Scientific Expertise: Debating the Covid-19 Pandemic in The Netherlands

José van Dijck, Donya Alinejad

This article examines the role of social media dynamics in the public exchange of information between scientists (experts), government (policy-makers), mass media (journalists), and citizens (nonexperts) during the first 4 months after the Covid-19 outbreak […]

  • Experts, Public Policy and the Question of Trust

Maria Baghramian, Michel Croce

This chapter discusses the topics of trust and expertise from the perspective of political epistemology. In particular, it addresses four main questions […]

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