The Trust in Research Undertaken in Science and Technology scholarly network (TRuST), was launched to address the declining levels of trust in science and academic institutions.
Dr. Mary Wells, dean of Waterloo Engineering and founding member of TRuST, speaks to the importance of strengthening trust in science and technology to positively advance society.
At the University of Waterloo, we looked at several surveys measuring how Canadians’ trust in science, academia, health, technology and government has changed over the years. Although there have been relatively few surveys measuring trust in science, the most consistent trend we’ve found is that trust in most institutions and individuals — especially the government — rose at the beginning of the pandemic but has since waned back to near pre-pandemic levels.
TRuST is the first multidisciplinary research network of its kind in Canada and aims to combat the growing trend of disinformation to better understand why some people deny, doubt or resist scientific findings and explanations. We’re exploring how engineers, scientists and researchers can find ways of embedding trust into the technologies that they are currently building. We hope this can lead to further considerations of the intended and unintended consequences of what those technologies can do.
It won’t be easy, but researchers and governments need to work together to think about how policy can shape how we consider future technologies and online tools to prevent the spread of damaging misinformation.
Go to Are we suffering a crisis in trust? for the full opinion piece.