Dataset Information

Values in environmental research: Citizens' views of scientists who acknowledge values.

ABSTRACT: Scientists who perform environmental research on policy-relevant topics face challenges when communicating about how values may have influenced their research. This study examines how citizens view scientists who publicly acknowledge values. Specifically, we investigate whether it matters: if citizens share or oppose a scientist's values, if a scientist's conclusions seem contrary to or consistent with the scientist's values, and if a scientist is assessing the state of the science or making a policy recommendation. We conducted two 3x2 factorial design online experiments. Experiment 1 featured a hypothetical scientist assessing the state of the science on the public-health effects of exposure to Bisphenol A (BPA), and Experiment 2 featured a scientist making a policy recommendation on use of BPA. We manipulated whether or not the scientist expressed values and whether the scientist's conclusion appeared contrary to or consistent with the scientist's values, and we accounted for whether or not subjects' values aligned with the scientist's values. We analyzed our data with ordinary least squares (OLS) regression techniques. Our results provide at least preliminary evidence that acknowledging values may reduce the perceived credibility of scientists within the general public, but this effect differs depending on whether scientists and citizens share values, whether scientists draw conclusions that run contrary to their values, and whether scientists make policy recommendations.

SUBMITTER: Elliott KC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5656313 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Values in environmental research: Citizens' views of scientists who acknowledge values.

Elliott Kevin C KC McCright Aaron M AM Allen Summer S Dietz Thomas T

PloS one 20171025 10

Scientists who perform environmental research on policy-relevant topics face challenges when communicating about how values may have influenced their research. This study examines how citizens view scientists who publicly acknowledge values. Specifically, we investigate whether it matters: if citizens share or oppose a scientist's values, if a scientist's conclusions seem contrary to or consistent with the scientist's values, and if a scientist is assessing the state of the science or making a p ...[more]

PMID: 29069087

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Project description:The economic valuation of ecosystem services in part reflects the desire to use conventional economic tools (markets and economic instruments) to conserve ecosystem services. However, for regulating and supporting ecosystem services that depend on ecosystem structure and function, estimation of economic value requires estimates of the current level of underlying ecological functions first. This primary step is in principle, the job of environmental scientists, not economists. Here, we provide a coarse-level quantitative assessment of the relationship between the research effort expended by environmental scientists (on the biophysical values) and economists (on the monetary values) on 15 different regulating and supporting services in 32 ecosystem types using peer-reviewed article hits retrieved from bibliographic databases as a measure of research effort. We find a positive, moderately strong (r = 0.69) correlation between research efforts in the two domains, a result that, while encouraging, is likely to reflect serendipity rather than the deliberate design of integrated environmental science-economics research programs. Our results suggest that compared to environmental science research effort economic valuation is devoted to a smaller, less diverse set of ecosystem services but a broader, more diverse, set of ecosystem types. The two domains differed more with respect to the ecosystem services that are the major focus of research effort than they did with respect to the ecosystem types of principal research interest. For example, carbon sequestration, erosion regulation, and nutrient cycling receive more relative research effort in the environmental sciences; air quality regulation in economic valuations. For both domains, cultivated areas, wetlands, and urban/semi-urban ecosystem types received relatively large research effort, while arctic and mountain tundra, cave and subterranean, cryosphere, intertidal/littoral zone, and kelp forest ecosystem types received negligible research effort. We suggest ways and means by which the field of sustainability science may be improved by the design and implementation of a searchable database of environmental science and economic valuation literature as well as a global ecosystem service research network and repository that explicitly links research on the estimation and prediction of biophysical ecosystem functions with that of the social sciences and other knowledge systems. These suggestions would, at least in principle, facilitate a more efficient research agenda between economists and environmental scientists and aid management, regulatory and judicial decision-makers.

Dataset Information

Values in environmental research: Citizens' views of scientists who acknowledge values.

Publications

Values in environmental research: Citizens' views of scientists who acknowledge values.

Similar Datasets

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