In this lecture, Adam Berinsky outlines the dramatic decline in public trust toward media and medical institutions, tracing the trend back to the 1970s. He argues that expertise alone no longer guarantees authority and that the traditional assumption that facts will speak for themselves is false. Drawing on two decades of survey research, Berinsky proposes communication‑focused strategies to rebuild credibility: (1) speak the audience’s language, recognizing that experts and laypeople use different vocabularies; (2) employ unexpected or relatable messengers rather than relying solely on high‑status experts. He illustrates these points with examples such as an MIT climate scientist’s failed attempts to persuade climate deniers and the challenges of convincing hard‑line anti‑vaccine groups. Berinsky suggests that effort should be concentrated on the “uncertain” segment of the public—those who are not firmly entrenched—because they are more receptive to corrective information. He emphasizes that authority can be cultivated through action and tailored messaging rather than by demanding trust. The talk concludes with a call to brainstorm practical tactics for communicating facts effectively in a low‑trust environment.
Chapters
Really a pleasure to be here. So here's another cartoon. Distrust every word, which is basically every media source from across the spectrum. So what are the political implications of this? Not surprisingly, if we look at trust in the media over time, we can see that it's dropped dramatically over the last. And this is only since 1997. If we go back to the 60s, the drop is even larger that basically we're in this situation, exemplified by that last slide I showed you, where everybody trusts nobody. What are we supposed to do with this? How can we navigate this field now, bringing it closer to home, Thinking about what would be the coming revolution in the loss of trust in medicine. The bad news I have for you today is that it's already here. So, so here, this is polls going back to the 1970s, and I pulled this. The headline here is that confidence in leaders of the scientific community has been pretty stable since the 70s. So this is seen as a good news. But if you look at this in comparison, looking at trust in medicine has dropped pretty dramatically since the 1970s. So you don't need to wait for the loss in trust in medicine. It's already here today. So, so I'm going to talk a little bit about how to navigate that, what to do about that, and really talking more generally about what I've learned about the loss of expertise and authority and really this loss in trust of facts and specifically the mistrust of experts. Unfortunately, I'm going to be talking more about the problems than the solutions, but hopefully can brainstorm about some ideas that can be effective, but thinking about how we can build credibility. And so this is about as happy as my lecture will get here, thinking about this, but thinking about how can we build credibility in a world of low trust? How can we have the truth win out? What strategies? Here's where it is. The difference is I'm not saying which strategies will work, but thinking about some strategies that could work. And how can we effectively communicate in a world where facts and science should speak for themselves? I'm, you know, I've spent my last 20 years in a university. You know, I'm a person of facts and science. But I've realized that when studying the American public and really the world public more generally, this doesn't happen. You know what happens there. So I've already shown you about the decline of trust in both the media and medicine. But thinking about how did this happen? And part of it is this mistrust of expertise and, and this rise of alternative facts, how to convey facts. So this notion of fact speaking for themselves, that if you hear a piece of misinformation, counter it and move on to the next thing. And so I think here where trust
can kind of come in as a
way to think about that. Now there's two things I want to talk about. The first is unrelated to my work on rumors, but comes out of my knowledge of 20 years of writing surveys and thinking about how to convey ideas from political elites, politicians to ordinary citizens, the mass public. And the key here is thinking about communication strategies. So think about building trust as communication. Putting yourself in your audience's shoes is really important.
And here's the most important part. Don't tell people to trust you, convince
them to trust you. So here's the two strategies. So first let me talk about this notion about experts and laypeople speaking different languages. And then second, I'm going to talk about relying on unexpected sources.
So the most important thing to do
is to speak your audience's language. Now this is really hard. So think about that MIT climate scientist I talked about.
They said, well, I'm just going to
go and talk to climate deniers, I'm going to basically lay the science on them and everything's going to be fine. Now this is intuitive, right? That they should have authority. But the problem is that a lot of times experts don't speak the language of their audience because our training and what makes us successful in our field doesn't necessarily make us effective communicators, right? Think about academic journal articles, you wouldn't necessarily hand them to your audience, to your patients and say, oh, here, this explains everything, right? Because as an expert you have the expertise, the background knowledge, the lingo to decipher what that means, right?
That brings me to the end here and kind of what I'm hoping that you take away from this is a couple points. The first is that expertise does not necessarily lead to trust, right? And so this is again going back to my conversation with my colleagues in climate science at mit. They're really well intentioned and these are National Academy science levels scientists. These are the biggest experts. These are people who want the mass public to accept their findings. But just going and saying I'm an MIT scientist, here's true isn't going to work, right? Because authority is not automatically granted.
So how can we build authority?
I think the most important thing is don't tell people to trust you. Convince them to trust you so you
can do this a couple ways.
Put yourself in your audience's shoes, right? Use language that they can understand in a way that you can effectively communicate what it is that you want them to know.
Speaking the language of your audience and finally finding authority through action.
Right. And then here's really where this, my experiments come in is that authority can be given by dint of your position. You're just finding the right person to say it. And so here is the kind of thing is that even though in many ways these are not very happy findings, there are some possibilities there, right? Hardliners might be a lost cause. And so I can't say what I'm doing at Facebook, but I can say the same arguments I'm making here today, I'm making to people when I talk to them at Facebook, which is basically there's a group of people that you're not going to be able to convince that these are the people who are hardlines anti vaxxers. And so spending the time trying to convince those people is a lost cause. However, there's another group of people you
can think about like the true believers,
the uncertain and then the people who do believe in it that even if you can't move people from the true believers to the I accept vaccines, you can move people who are uncertain to the truth. Right. So kind of increasing these rejection of misinformation by targeting people who I like
