2024-08-28 14:01:30
A recent study has sought the answer to this question, in this case focusing on the Spanish population.
The research, carried out by specialists from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (USC), both in Spain, is based on an analysis of how Spaniards were informed during the COVID-19 pandemic and their perception of the role of journalists, the media, the scientific community, and government and health authorities during the pandemic.
The result is that young people trust science less than older people.
72.6% of young people aged 18 to 24 agree that science seeks the truth and makes it public, while 90.2% of adults over 65 support this statement. In addition, the percentage of young people of this same age who believe that science is a danger to humanity is almost three times higher than that of older people who hold this opinion. These are some of the data that emerge from this study.
These results suggest that there is a growing distrust of science among young people, which explains, for example, the scarcity of scientific vocations in this segment. “Young people do not want to enroll in science, technology and mathematics courses, because they believe that science is not a method for searching for the truth and that it is even dangerous for the future of human beings,” says one of the authors of the study, Carlos Elías, professor of Journalism in the Department of Communication at UC3M.
“It is paradoxical and very worrying that the generations with the greatest access to information and education, the best educated in the history of Spain, are those who consume the least information and who are most distrustful of science and journalism, two fields that share the search for truth. We must reflect deeply on what is happening,” says Alberto Quian, professor of Journalism at USC and co-author of the study.
Source: Science News.com / Amazings.com