Social Science Expertise Need Credible Engagement to Reach the Public

For years, we’ve been told a familiar story: social scientists such as economists, management scholars, sociologists, talk and the public shrugs. The claim goes that people don’t find our work interesting, that our expertise is fuzzy compared with “hard” sciences, and that journalists and readers will always prefer the crisp authority of practitioners such as CEOs, consultants or politicians… Is that really true?

We put it to a real-world test in a large survey and found the opposite, with a twist: audiences do want to hear from economists, management scholars and sociologists, but they reward social scientists when we stay in our lane, and they pull back when we stray or act as quasi-practitioners.

In short: the public is listening, but it listens for fit.

Communication barriers around expertise, trust and a crowded stage

In public debate and in our research we reviewed three recurring “headwinds” that social scientists experience when trying to reach people through the media.

1) A perceived expertise gap: because questions related to social issues overlap with everyday experience and can feel like “common sense”, audiences may rate social sciences as less “scientific” than physics, biology or medicine. That proximity helps relevance, but it can also hide the value of specialised methods unless we make them explicit.

2) A trustworthiness barrier: In a polarised, “post-truth” environment, social science scholars are at times suspected of partisanship; reproducibility debates can also loom larger here than in many Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

These are perceptions that circulate in the public arena, not judgements we endorse, yet they can raise the bar for social sciences scholars seeking legitimacy with broad audiences.

3) The channel problem: competition from practitioners. Media spaces are porous for social issues, and business leaders, consultants and politicians have frequent, sometimes privileged access to newsrooms. In that crowded arena, it is easy to assume that, for example, a CEO who “lives it every day” will sound more credible than a management scholar. This is why it is often predicted that practitioners will dominate attention and trust.

Why do these issues matter?

It follows on directly from those headwinds. If left unchallenged, they mute the very value social sciences create: ideas that frame problems, test claims and inform choices in policy, business and everyday life. Because our impact travels through interpretation more than through patents or products such as in “hard” science, broad, credible communication isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s one of the main routes by which social sciences scholars’ work reaches citizens, NGOs, firms and policymakers.

Mass media help on all three fronts: media outlets reach heterogeneous audiences, add editorial scrutiny that can bolster trust, and offer durable spaces (analysis, op-eds, explainers) where methods and evidence can be made visible.

Social sciences scholars already use these channels more than many “hard” science peers. But do those advantages actually let them break through the headwinds? Do audiences grant scholars trust and attention in this arena, and under what conditions? That is the question our study tests.

What we found: a scholar premium with guardrails

To move beyond assumptions, we built an experiment around a familiar media format: a paywalled newspaper op-ed on a current policy topic.

A representative French sample of 1,080 adults saw one version of the op-ed in which we randomly varied multiple elements. Participants then rated the author’s perceived trustworthiness, expertise and legitimacy, and told us whether they wanted to keep reading, a real behavioural proxy because the article was truncated behind a paywall.

We also ran partial replications in the UK and Spain to check generalisability. The stimuli and measures were built to mirror real op-eds and were validated for plausibility and fit.

Across countries, the pattern is clear. People trust social science scholars more than practitioners, but mainly when scholars talk about their own field. When an economist writes on the economy, a sociologist on social outcomes, or a management scholar on firms, trust and expertise turn into legitimacy and real engagement (measured through willingness to pay). Step outside that lane and the edge largely disappears.

The competition story then turns out to be subtler than the “practitioner always wins” intuition. Readers may reasonably expect a practitioner to sound practical, but in our data they still grant an initial trust edge to the academic label, and they reward it when the scholar writes within their field. Put differently: experience matters, but so does disinterested expertise, and audiences appear to use disciplinary fit to decide when the latter should lead.

One more finding concerns the “double hat”. When an author was introduced as both a scholar and a practitioner, credibility tended to drop. Readers seemed to treat the practitioner hat as trumping the scholar’s independence. Being a practitioner isn’t the issue; but in public-facing media, leading with the academic hat may keep the trust signal clearer.

What it means for universities, journalists and scholars

Universities should treat op-eds and news analysis as core dissemination work for the social sciences and resource it accordingly: training, editorial support and recognition in evaluation. But the incentive should be to communicate more within one’s field, not to opine on everything.

Our evidence indicates that credibility and engagement rise when scholars speak from inside their discipline; institutional nudges ought to reinforce that fit, not erode it.

For editors and reporters, the lesson is practical. The “right expert for the right story” is what readers use to grant trust. Make the disciplinary match explicit in intros and standfirsts; ask scholars to show what their evidence can and cannot claim; and double down on verification.

In a space where accusations of partisanship and “ivory tower” aloofness circulate, strong fact-checking and transparent sourcing provide the external stamp of quality that Social science commentary especially needs, and that our data links to higher engagement.

What about researchers?

Communicating well does not mean speaking about everything; it means speaking from your research. Make the fit obvious up front, keep a clear line between analysis and advocacy, and explain methods in plain language. If you also wear a practitioner hat, be transparent – but consider whether foregrounding that identity will distract from the scholarly message in mass-media contexts. In our data, it often did.

The claim that “the public doesn’t care about social sciences” doesn’t survive contact with data.

People will read social scientists – and credit them – when scholars speak from their evidence, within their discipline, and as scholars rather than stand-in practitioners. That is not a constraint; it is a charter for better public conversation. If universities and newsrooms organise themselves around those guardrails, social sciences won’t just be heard; they’ll be useful.