“Do what that expert says – until you know better”: How people gauge expert advice

It is often suggested that people have stopped listening to science and expert knowledge on issues like climate change or vaccines and replaced established expertise with a polarized landscape of social media bubbles. While surveys track trust in science, how lay people assess expertise is less clear. This article develops a theory of how lay people gauge expert advice through a combination of sociological concepts of authority and expertise as well as 150 qualitative interviews from five countries. Because interviewees responded to different recruitment ads framed as either pro-science, neutral or anti-science, the analysis can identify commonalities across very different positions. The analysis finds that lay people “gauge” expert advice to evaluate both the nature of the problem they face and how the experts stack up in relation to themselves and whether any biases may be involved. People thus try to control their exposure to experts without losing access to science and expertise, which they typically praise. The key contribution is to describe the active and integrated gauging where lay people oscillate between acceptance and rejection while claiming to acknowledge the cultural authority of science.