Toward a Clarified Framework of Trust in Science–Public Relations: Four perspectives and Their Analytical Implications
Trust has become a central concept in research on science–public relations. It appears in debates on expertise, misinformation, uncertainty communication, public engagement, institutional credibility, open science, risk governance, and the legitimacy of science in democratic societies. Yet the literature does not conceptualize trust in a sufficiently differentiated way. The same term is used to describe justified reliance on experts, confidence in institutions, positive responses to communication strategies, judgments of integrity, willingness to accept policy guidance, and broader relations of recognition or exclusion. The field is therefore rich in insight but uneven in conceptual precision.
This paper argues that research on trust in science–public relations has developed along four major perspectives: epistemic, moral–value, communication-effects, and relational–institutional. Each identifies an important dimension of trust, but they operate at different analytical levels and attach the concept to different objects, processes, and evaluative standards. Because they are often discussed as though they address the same question, findings remain difficult to compare and accumulate.
The paper has two aims. First, it clarifies how these four perspectives conceptualize trust and what assumptions they make about science, publics, and communication. Second, it develops an analytical framework showing how they differ in both analytical level and conceptualization of trust. The study is based on a narrative review of 161 articles on trust in science, science communication, expertise, public understanding of science, and related fields.
The epistemic perspective understands trust as justified reliance under conditions of unequal knowledge. It asks how non-experts can reasonably depend on experts and scientific institutions when they cannot assess the evidence directly. Its focus is competence, reliability, expertise, and warranted deference. Its main contribution is conceptual rigor: it distinguishes trust from mere compliance, liking, or blind faith.
The moral–value perspective emphasizes that trust is also shaped by judgments of integrity, fairness, responsibility, respect, and responsiveness to public concerns. Competence matters, but it is not sufficient. Publics also judge how scientific actors handle uncertainty, manage conflicts of interest, communicate values, and engage affected communities. This perspective shows that trust is not only an informational issue but also an ethical and political one.
The communication-effects perspective treats trust mainly as an empirical outcome shaped by communication strategies, media environments, source characteristics, and audience dispositions. It examines how framing, uncertainty communication, tone, media exposure, and platform context increase or reduce trust. This perspective provides valuable empirical findings, but often uses a broad operational meaning of trust, treating it as confidence, credibility, support, or favorable orientation.
The relational–institutional perspective places trust within wider social, institutional, and political relations. Trust is understood as a socially situated relation shaped by status asymmetries, institutional histories, media logics, power inequalities, and the science–state interface. From this view, publics are not singular, and distrust is not always a deficit. It may be a reasonable response to exclusion, failed accountability, or marginalization.
To clarify these differences, the paper develops a two by two framework. The horizontal axis moves from individual and interactional judgment to broader social and institutional relations. The vertical axis moves from normative grounds to empirical processes. The epistemic perspective occupies the upper left quadrant, the moral–value perspective the upper right, the communication-effects perspective the lower left, and the relational–institutional perspective the lower right. The figure therefore shows not just four types of trust research, but four distinct understandings of what trust is and where it is located analytically.
The paper’s main contribution is conceptual clarification. It shows that trust in science–public relations does not refer to a single phenomenon. By distinguishing four perspectives within a shared framework, it clarifies where previous scholarship converges, where it diverges, and why findings often remain fragmented. It also offers a more precise vocabulary for specifying what kind of trust is being studied, whose trust is at stake, what its object is, and through what conditions it is formed. In this way, the paper advances greater conceptual precision, stronger theoretical comparability, and more cumulative dialogue in research on trust in science–public relations.