Can formative exposure to institutional crises shape durable political generations in their evaluations of science?
Beyond the abstract: the argument, study design, evidence, and limits of inference.
The manuscript proposes that attitudes toward science may reflect lessons citizens associate with formative experiences of institutional achievement or crisis. Political generations are not identical to birth-year bands: people who lived through the same events can interpret those events differently, and later political environments shape which memories are salient.
The research uses multi-decade General Social Survey information on confidence in the scientific community together with confidence in government and media. It reports ordinal and partial proportional-odds models and latent-class analysis. Studying configurations of institutional trust helps avoid assuming that every respondent belongs on a single spectrum from pro-science to anti-science.
The manuscript reports historical group patterns in institutional confidence, but these comparisons do not identify which formative event caused a particular adult attitude. The later science-confidence project finds limited support for several specified crisis-exposure explanations of the long-run ideological reversal. The website should show this tension rather than implying memory alone has solved the puzzle.
Research basis: Generational Memory and the Formation of Science Trust, unpublished manuscript; separate GSS work through 2024.
Birth cohorts are not homogeneous and repeated cross-sectional surveys do not observe individual memories. Age, period, cohort, and formative exposure are difficult to separate; this is an unpublished manuscript, not a settled causal history of science distrust.
Unpublished manuscript, Generational Memory and the Formation of Science Trust.