Six out of ten French people declare themselves interested in science. Fewer than one in two judge the scientific community to be independent. These two figures, drawn from the Universcience and Viavoice 2026 critical thinking barometer, do not contradict each other. They sketch a decoupling that public debate struggles to name correctly.
The dominant narrative would have it that mistrust of science increases with ignorance. The data tells a different story. The French embrace the scientific project. They doubt its institutional functioning. These are not the same problem, and they do not call for the same remedy.
The Essentials
- 60% of French people declare themselves interested in science, according to the Universcience/Viavoice 2026 barometer, a level that has remained stable for several years
- Fewer than one French person in two believes that the scientific community is independent of economic and political interests
- The 15-24 age group shows an even more positive relationship with science than the national average, with about a quarter declaring themselves “very interested”
- The lever identified by researchers in communication sciences is not scientific education but transparency regarding conflicts of interest and sources of funding
- Mistrust of institutions touches all levels of French society, far beyond the scientific field alone
Interest Holds, Contrary to What We Believe
Sixty percent. This figure deserves to be stated before any commentary, because it directly contradicts the catastrophism that has pervaded scientific circles and opinion pages in recent years. Science is not losing the French population. It has it, and substantially.
The critical thinking barometer, published annually by Universcience in partnership with Viavoice, has measured French attitudes toward science for several editions now. The declared interest remains at a solid level. Curiosity about major scientific questions, about discoveries, about debates on life, space, or climate, remains a French sociological reality.
This result should close certain discussions. No, the French are not turning their backs on science. No, the era of social media has not replaced scientific curiosity with generalized relativism. The diagnosis of a collapse in scientific culture is empirically false.
It is also politically useful to dismantle, because it points toward the wrong solutions. If the problem were ignorance or disinterest, the answer would be mediation, popularization, more science museums and Arte documentaries. This answer already exists, it is necessary, but it does not address the real point of friction.
The real point of friction lies elsewhere, in the 52% of French people who doubt the independence of those who do science — the flip side of the 48% who believe the scientific community to be independent.
Mistrust Targets Functioning, Not Results
Fewer than one French person in two judges the scientific community to be independent. This formulation deserves to be unpacked, because it is often misread. It does not mean that French people reject scientific conclusions, that they deny climate change or think that vaccines kill. It means that they have doubts about the process by which these conclusions are produced.
This is a distinction that researchers in scientific communication have made for a long time. Trust in science is multidimensional. One can trust the results while doubting the actors. One can believe that the scientific method is the best way to produce knowledge while suspecting that certain results are shaped by the funding that made them possible.
This latter doubt is not irrational. It rests on real foundations. Scandals involving conflicts of interest in pharmaceutical research are documented. Publication bias, whereby studies concluding a positive effect are published more easily than negative studies, is a problem recognized by the scientific community itself. The replication crisis, which swept through experimental psychology and other disciplines in the 2010s, was widely covered in the media.
A French person who knows all this and deduces from it that the scientific community is not entirely independent is not making a reasoning error. He or she is applying informed critical thinking. The problem is not their mistrust. The problem is the absence of sufficient institutional tools to distinguish independent research from oriented research.
This absence is the true subject of the barometer.
The Young, Between Relative Enthusiasm and Early Mistrust
The figure for 15-24 year-olds deserves particular attention. According to the barometer, their relationship with science is even more positive than the national average: about a quarter of them even declare themselves “very interested,” a proportion that official sources present as encouraging data. This reality is often obscured by alarmist discourse about young people and science, which finds no real support in the data.
Declared interest in science among young people follows the same logic as interest in other domains of knowledge: it evolves with age, experience, and professional specialization. Young adults consistently declare less interest in institutions and formal knowledge than forty-year-olds, regardless of the domain measured. This is not necessarily a generational trend; it may be a life-cycle effect.
What is more concerning is the combination of enthusiasm for scientific content and probably strong mistrust toward the institutions that produce it. Those under 25 are the generation that grew up with social media as their primary infrastructure for information. They are exposed to distribution circuits where the status of the sender — recognized expert or anonymous influencer — makes no visible difference in format. In this environment, the question of the independence of sources, whether scientific or not, arises with particular urgency.
The response to this challenge will not be purely pedagogical. Young people do not lack access to scientific information. They lack tools to evaluate the credibility of its producers in a horizontal information environment. This points, once again, to transparency rather than popularization.
Mistrust of institutions touches all levels of French society, far beyond the scientific field alone: the work of Chloé Morin and Francis Fukuyama on contemporary mistrust shows that this perceived secession between elites and the rest of the population cuts across all institutions. The scientific community is not spared; nor is it a unique case.
Pedagogy Is Not the Lever — Transparency Is
For thirty years, the institutional response to the problem of mistrust toward science has taken a fairly constant form: more mediation, scientific culture, accessible popularization. Science museums, science festivals, critical thinking courses in high schools, podcasts by researchers. These initiatives have their own value. They sustain interest, they create encounters between publics and knowledge, they form citizens capable of reading a statistical result without drowning in it.
But they do not address the doubt about independence. A citizen who perfectly understands how a randomized clinical trial works can very well wonder who funded it and whether negative results were published. Scientific competence and confidence in scientific actors are two distinct things. One can have the former without the latter.
The true lever is transparency about the conditions of science production. Who funds which laboratory. Which researchers have links with which industrialists. What proportion of clinical trials results in publication, and for which results. This information exists in part. It is rarely accessible in simple and systematic fashion.
Several initiatives are working on this ground. In France, the public database Transparence-Santé, created and launched in June 2014, records links of interest between healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Its legal framework had been set by a regulation in December 2013, but the database has been operational since 2014. This is real progress, but its scope is limited to health and its readability remains weak for the general public. At the international level, the Open Science movement pushes toward systematic publication of raw data and study protocols, which would allow any third party to verify results. Journals like PLOS ONE or eLife have adopted the publication of peer review reports, making the peer review process visible.
These practices are progressing. They are not yet the norm. And as long as they are not, doubt about the independence of the scientific community will have a real substrate, even if the French who express it do not know the technical details of the problem.
What Scientific Institutions Can Do Concretely
The good news in this picture is that French mistrust is not structurally irreducible. It is not based on a principled rejection of the scientific approach. It bears on institutional practices that can evolve.
Several paths are already underway. The CNRS has developed a scientific crisis communication unit that intervenes during public controversies to provide methodological insights, rather than simple assertions of authority. This approach, which shows the reasoning rather than simply stating it, is more effective with an audience accustomed to questioning sources. Inserm regularly publishes surveys of scientific literature on topics of public interest, with explicit exposition of levels of evidence and areas of uncertainty.
These practices of epistemic humility — acknowledging what we know, what we do not know, and why experts can disagree — are probably the best confidence-building lever available. Displayed certainty has historically been counterproductive. When an institution asserts something peremptorily and reality proves more complex, the credit lost is disproportionate to what initial nuance would have cost.
The question of public research funding also plays a role. The share of financing through competitive projects, often linked to industrial partnerships or prioritized political orientations, has increased in most developed countries to the detriment of recurring funding that enables free and long-term research. In France, the National Research Agency finances an increasing proportion of academic research through project calls. This logic has merit in terms of allocative efficiency, but it creates real dependencies that the French, in their intuitive way, seem to perceive.
Reinvesting in free basic research is therefore an answer to mistrust, as much as a scientific necessity. The two justifications reinforce each other.
Critical Thinking Is Not the Enemy of Science
There is a temptation in scientific and academic circles to read mistrust toward the community as a symptom of cultural backwardness, latent conspiracy thinking, weak critical thought. The Universcience barometer suggests the opposite.
French people who doubt the independence of researchers do not reject the scientific method. They apply, often correctly, an elementary principle of critical thinking: identify potential biases in a source before accepting its conclusions. This principle is taught in methodology courses, repeated in fact-checking manuals, valued by scientific communicators themselves. It should not be surprising that a population exposed to these messages ends up applying it to the producers of science as well.
The appropriate response to this critical thinking is not to refute it or circumvent it through reasserted authority. It is to give it the means to exercise itself correctly, with accessible information on conflicts of interest, standardized transparency protocols, and a culture of acknowledged rather than hidden uncertainty.
This is a demanding program. It requires scientific institutions to change certain communication and governance habits, not merely to intensify their presence in public space. The open question is whether they view this transformation as a priority or as an additional constraint in an already financially strained context.
Sources
- Critical Thinking Barometer 2026, Universcience/Viavoice — education.newstank.fr
- Transparence-Santé Database, Ministry of Health — transparence.sante.gouv.fr
- Open Science Initiative, European Commission — Report on the State of Open Science in Europe, 2024 (no link, internal report)
- National Research Agency — Annual data on the share of project-based funding in French public research
- Critical Thinking Barometer 2026 – Universcience (official page) — universcience.fr
- Viavoice Institute – Critical Thinking Barometer 2026 — institut-viavoice.com
- Ministry of Culture – Critical Thinking Barometer 2026 — culture.gouv.fr
- Transparence-Santé – official government website — transparence.sante.gouv.fr
- Wikipedia – Transparence-Santé (creation date) — fr.wikipedia.org
- PLOS – Official Open Peer Review policy — plos.org
- Cevipof/Opinionway Barometer – Institutional Mistrust in France — sciencespo.fr
- Wikipedia – Replication Crisis — fr.wikipedia.org