Science enables us to advance our knowledge about matter, the Universe, the living world and society, to understand phenomena and to interpret or even anticipate them. Scientific knowledge is also increasingly used in expert appraisals prior to political decisions, for example in the field of public health, as during the health the Covid-19 epidemic crisis caused by the. The role of science and scientists in decision-making, and public confidence in science and scientists, have been the subject of debate for several years now, with the issues of vaccination and global warming being just two examples.[1]
Polling institutes and research centres regularly carry out opinion surveys to assess public confidence in science and scientists. Ifop does this periodically in France; some of these surveys, carried out on an international scale, enable interesting comparisons to be made between countries. In January 2025, for example, the University of Zurich published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour the results of an international survey of public opinion on science and researchers, carried out in cooperation with research institutes in several countries, including France. The authors of the survey questioned 72,000 citi
