NOTE-113: Status distrust of scientific experts

Contribution

The paper names “status distrust”: distrust of a speaker in virtue of their high social status, where status overrides every other indicator of trustworthiness (pp. 5, 11–12). It sets out an explicit five-step argument scheme on which that distrust follows validly from the truster’s vulnerability and from doubt that the dominant ethos of service includes the truster’s interests (§6, pp. 16–17). It offers this as an alternative to “irrationality views” of stubborn science distrust, both the charitable version (lack of education or exposure to misinformation) and the uncharitable one (“post-truth” cynicism, McIntyre 2018) (pp. 3–4). It also reinterprets conspiratorial claims as expressions of social position rather than literal descriptions (§7).

Key insight

Stubborn distrust of experts, the kind that no evidence, competence or goodwill can shift, is not about what the expert says. It is about where the expert stands. Social status just is greater influence over collective decisions (p. 11). So someone with little influence, who has reason to think the high-status group’s idea of “service” leaves out their core values, has reason to distrust anyone who holds that status, however well-meaning they are. Because the ground is structural, nothing the individual expert does can remove it. That is why the distrust is “stubborn”, and why it takes a conspiratorial shape: “the elite” personifies an abstract status hierarchy (p. 20).

Assumptions

Premises and authorities the argument relies on:

• Trust entails vulnerability — [Background 1]: entering a trusting commitment leaves the truster vulnerable to the trustee’s future decisions; “from definition of trust” (Baier 1986) (p. 16).
• Prestige carries service norms — [Background 2]: a high-prestige trustee’s future actions are expected to be constrained by service-for-prestige norms; “from definition of prestige” (Price and Van Vugt 2014) (p. 16).
• Status defined as decision weight — social status is “the influence over collective decision-making that an individual is given by others” (p. 11); footnote 9 adds empirical support that high-status individuals are trusted more (Glaeser et al. 1999; Lount and Pettit 2012).
• Scientists are high-status — as prestige rather than dominance, evidenced by trust polls (Ipsos 2019: scientists most trusted of 17 occupations across 23 countries, 60% actively trusting; politicians 9%) and by business supplying roughly 60% of global science funding (pp. 9–10).
• Distrusters are a minority — footnote 9: Premise 1 “assumes that status distrusters are not widespread”; otherwise the usual status markers invert.
• Expert is taken in a matter-of-fact sense: credentials, professional research practice, and being asked to inform the public or policy (fn. 1, p. 2). The paper takes no side between social-role and competence accounts of expertise.
• Scope: the argument covers “stubborn” distrust only, meaning distrust resistant to evidence, competence and goodwill (p. 3). It excludes the “circumscribed” distrust grounded in defeasible suspicions of bias or conflicts of interest, which the paper counts as not irrational anyway (pp. 2–3).

Key results

What the paper argues:

• Two views of professional status (§2, pp. 6–8): on the traditional view status indicates trustworthiness, and on the subversive view it indicates a lack of trustworthiness or even distrustworthiness. Having an indicator of distrustworthiness does not by itself entail distrust (p. 8).
• Scientists’ status is prestige, which is morally ambiguous (§3): prestige can be turned into dominance, and both are rooted in “power” as the capacity to realise one’s intentions (Chapais 2015; Hobbes) (p. 10). The paper also says “there is no evidence that abuses occur” but that scientists have more opportunity for “subtle abuses of privilege” than a manual labourer (p. 10).
• Status distrust defined (§4, pp. 11–12): distrust in which status-as-indicator-of-distrustworthiness dominates all other indicators. Every stated ideal is explained away as status-seeking, and the social structures of control are distrusted too, which gives it a “conspiratorial dimension”.
• Case (§5, pp. 12–15): the Havasupai refused re-use of their blood-sample data by ASU researchers (diabetes consent, re-used for schizophrenia and migration research). The paper argues that when a community’s core values (“spiritual harm”, “tradition”; TallBear 2013) are not represented in decisions about re-use, withholding trust is justified “even if the latter is well-intentioned” (p. 14). It uses the case against “blanket consent” models (Mckeown et al. 2021).
• The argument scheme (§6, pp. 16–17):
  1. [Premise 1: status vulnerability] a low-prestige truster, if a conflict of interest arises, will get less trust and social support from third parties than the trustee;
  2. [Premise 2: service doubt] the truster has reason to believe the dominant service-for-prestige ethos “does not integrate their core interests”;
  3. so the trustee’s norm-governed future decisions will conflict with the truster’s core interests (from P2, B2);
  4. so the truster will not be supported by third parties in a conflict (from P1);
  5. therefore the truster has reason to distrust the candidate trustee “in virtue of their high degree of prestige” (from 3, 4).
• Service doubt is the trigger (p. 18): status differences alone do not produce status distrust. Past trauma such as Tuskegee “increase[s] the credence” that high-status groups do not keep service-for-prestige norms. COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, highest among disadvantaged communities (Paul, Steptoe and Fancourt 2021), is offered as a further example.
• Soundness left open (pp. 18–20): the one clear case where the scheme is sound is a self-serving totalitarian regime, whose citizens lack republican liberty (Pettit 1997). Whether it carries over to liberal democracies is “beyond the scope of this paper”. “There is no easy answer” to how justified and unjustified status distrust are to be told apart, and immoral actors’ status distrust may be unjustified (p. 19).
• Conspiracy claims as social expression (§7, pp. 20–21): a claim like “they want to reduce the world population” should be read “less as a description of a state of affairs” and more as a statement of the distruster’s social position. Taken literally such claims are unjustified, but distrusters “are not necessarily wrong in believing that they will be harmed if they trust them”.
• Practical upshot (p. 21): expert communicators should be aware of the status differences the expertise gap brings with it, and should stress that their communication is about “care and service to the community, and not only about scientific truth”.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	Stubborn distrust of scientific experts can be reconstructed as a valid reasoning scheme from status vulnerability and service doubt	moderate	informal argument: explicit premise–conclusion scheme in §6 (pp. 16–17). Validity is asserted, not formally checked, and the step from 3 and 4 to “in virtue of prestige” leans on Background 2
C2	Low-status individuals can justifiably distrust high-status experts (abstract)	weak	the body declines to establish when the premises hold (p. 15); the only sound case given is totalitarianism (p. 19). The abstract claims more than the body shows
C3	Social status is influence over collective decision-making	weak	stipulated definition (p. 11), with footnote support that high-status people are trusted more (fn. 9)
C4	Scientists are high-status, as prestige	moderate	polling (Ipsos 2019; Pew 2020) and funding shares (~60% business; Scienceogram 2013, UNESCO 2020) (pp. 9–10)
C5	The Havasupai refusal is better explained as status distrust than as irrationality	weak	one illustrative case drawn from secondary sources (Lee 2021; TallBear 2013); no evidence on the counterfactual
C6	Communities most resistant to COVID-19 vaccines were the disadvantaged ones, and their distrust was “stubborn”	moderate	cited survey work (Paul et al. 2021; KFF 2021b); reported, not analysed here
C7	Status differentials alone do not trigger status distrust; service doubt does	weak	informal argument plus the Tuskegee example (Alsan and Wanamaker 2018) (p. 18)
C8	Conspiratorial ascriptions function to express lack of control and doubt about outcomes, not to describe states of affairs	weak	interpretive assertion (pp. 20–21); no empirical test
C9	Rejecting irrationality views is ethically and pragmatically warranted, because accusing people of irrationality feeds resentment and polarisation	weak	assertion with one citation (Carpenter et al. 2021) (p. 4)

Method

A conceptual “how-possibly” argument (p. 6). The paper combines the sociology of the professions (§2), the anthropology of prestige and dominance (§3) and the philosophy of trust (Baier; Hawley; O’Neill) to motivate a definition (§4). It illustrates the definition with a case study drawn from secondary literature (§5), sets out an argument scheme from two background definitions and two premises (§6), and applies it to conspiracy thinking (§7). There is no empirical work, and the author explicitly declines a comparative, abductive assessment against rival explanations such as testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007) (p. 6).

Concepts

• stubborn distrust: distrust resistant to evidence for the experts’ views, demonstrations of competence, or displays of goodwill (p. 3). It is opposed to circumscribed distrust that rests on defeasible suspicions of bias.
• status distrust: distrusting a speaker “in virtue of their high degree of social status”, where status is “not just an indicator of a lack of trustworthiness, but an indicator of distrustworthiness” (p. 5) and overrides other indicators (p. 11). Footnote 10 notes that strictly it is “prestige distrust”.
• social status: the influence over collective decision-making that others give an individual (p. 11).
• prestige vs dominance: freely conferred respect for skills that benefit others, versus coercive rank (Henrich and Gil-White 2001) (p. 9).
• service-for-prestige norms: status is conferred on the expectation that the holder puts their skill at the community’s service (Price and Van Vugt 2014) (p. 9).
• status vulnerability / service doubt: Premises 1 and 2 of the §6 scheme.
• traditional vs subversive view: whether professional status indicates trustworthiness (Freidson) or is the goal that service ideals serve (M. S. Larson 1977) (§2).

Connections

The epistemic notion here is trust in expert testimony, and specifically when distrust is rational. The paper takes a non-evidentialist line. Rational distrust can rest on the truster’s structural position (vulnerability, and whether their values are represented) rather than on evidence about the expert’s competence or honesty. It says status distrust “cuts across” the split between affective trust (Baier 1986) and belief-based trust (Hawley 2014; O’Neill 2002): consciously it is felt as affect, but underneath it is “a reasonable belief in one’s own vulnerability” (p. 5). It is a rationalising rather than a debunking account of science distrust, set explicitly against the view that conspiracy theorising is epistemically vicious (Harris 2018; Hansson 2017), and closer to Coady (2006, 2007). The epistemology tag is justified, and it should be the primary tag.

Held companions, all Deferred: LIT-119 and LIT-203 (Keeley on conspiracy theories and trust). Keeley 2023 argues nearly the opposite, that the sweeping distrust some conspiracy theories presuppose undermines them (“epistemic nihilism”). Desmond’s §7 reading of conspiratorial claims as social expression rather than literal description is the natural point of contact, so the pair would reward reading together. LIT-139 (Douglas, inductive risk and values in science) is related through Elliott 2017 and the values-in-science literature Desmond draws on for expert communication. Desmond does not cite Douglas.

Bearing on the record

Supports no THEORY document in nucleation that I can identify. It carries nothing for ML practice. The skim’s suggested link to “AI-governance debates about trust in technical elites” is the reader’s extrapolation. The paper does not mention AI, and nothing in the Anthology of the SOTA’s scope follows from it. Its one recommendation (§7) is about how scientific experts should communicate, which is outside ML practice.

Limitations

• Validity only, by the author’s own account. Whether the premises are ever true in liberal democracies, and so whether status distrust is ever justified there, is left open (pp. 15, 19). The abstract’s “justifiably” overstates this.
• The inference to step 5 needs Background 2 to hold, meaning the trustee really is bound by the ethos in question. The conclusion then attributes the distrust to prestige when the operative reasons are the truster’s vulnerability and the content of the ethos. The “in virtue of status” framing is partly a relabelling.
• Premise 1 is scoped to distrust as a minority attitude (fn. 9), which sits awkwardly with the paper’s claim that group distrust is “truly intersectional” and widespread (p. 4).
• No empirical evidence ties status to distrust. The case study is illustrative and secondhand, and the author assumes the researchers were well-intentioned without argument (p. 13). It contains a probable date slip (the Havasupai suit is placed in “the 1990s”).
• No comparison with rival explanations such as testimonial injustice (Fricker) or the empirical predictors of conspiracy belief (van Prooijen 2017), which the author says would need that literature (p. 6).
• The §7 reading of conspiracy claims as non-descriptive is interpretive, and it risks the very condescension the paper criticises in irrationality views. The paper does not address this.

Open questions

• When is Premise 2 (service doubt) true in a liberal democracy? The paper points to the Havasupai and religious-freedom question but does not settle it (p. 19). An account of which excluded values make exclusion from the service ethos legitimate or illegitimate would close it.
• Do measured status differentials predict stubborn distrust of scientists over and above education, ideology and prior institutional harm? A survey design that separates status from these would test the “how-possibly” story as an actual explanation.
• How does status distrust relate to Keeley’s argument (LIT-119) that global distrust is self-undermining? Is status distrust local enough to escape “epistemic nihilism”?

Corrections to the seeded skim

• The skim’s key takeaway says low-status people “can justifiably distrust” experts. The body claims less. §6 (p. 15) says the conditions under which the premises are true, “and thus status distrust actually justified”, are left open, and that showing “some valid reasoning” is enough; §1 (p. 6) calls the whole thing a “how-possibly” argument and explicitly not an abductive best-explanation argument. The abstract’s “justifiably” overstates what the body argues.
• The abstract as printed has a double negative: distrust is justified “if they are not confident that the experts do not have their best interests at heart” (p. 1). The skim and LIT summary silently repair it to “whom they do not trust to have their interests at heart”. The repair matches §6/§8 and should stay, but it is a repair.
• The skim’s §§2–4 line runs two steps together. §2 contrasts a “traditional” view (status indicates trustworthiness; Freidson) with a “subversive” view (status is the goal and service ideals the means; M. S. Larson 1977). §3 argues scientists hold status as prestige (Henrich and Gil-White 2001) under “service-for-prestige” norms (Price and Van Vugt 2014). §4 defines status distrust as the case where status-as-indicator-of-distrustworthiness overrides all other indicators (pp. 11–12). The skim is correct in substance, but “service-for-prestige norms are thought to be violated” is §6’s gloss, not §4’s.
• §5 (the precision-medicine case) is illustrative only and cites no data linking status to distrust. It rests on Lee 2021 and TallBear 2013, and assumes for argument that the researchers were well-intentioned (p. 13). It also dates the Havasupai suit against ASU to “the 1990s” (p. 12). The blood samples were collected in 1990, but the suit is generally reported as filed in 2004 and settled in 2010 (not checked here against a primary source). This is a small factual slip in the paper, not the skim’s.
• The skim omits a real restriction. Footnote 9 (p. 16) says Premise 1 “assumes that status distrusters are not widespread”; if they are, the usual markers of high status can become markers of low status. The argument is scoped to status distrust as a minority attitude.
• primary topic: epistemology — the work is about trust in expert testimony and when distrust is rational, which is the epistemology blurb word for word (“testimony, trust and expertise”). philosophy-of-science (what science is, what its theories say) is secondary: the paper takes no position on scientific method or theory and treats scientists only as a profession holding prestige.
• Consider adding social-science: §§2–3 are built on the sociology of the professions (Freidson, Larson, Abbott) and the anthropology of prestige and dominance (Henrich and Gil-White, Price and Van Vugt, Chapais), so a reader browsing that topic would be right to expect it.