Final Essay

Society is made up of individuals who have agreed to work together for mutual benefit. In order for society to run smoothly, everyone needs to do their job. As public citizens, people need to take responsibility of their actions; In regard to science, scientists are responsible for passing important information to the public in order to shape public policy. Of course, this is easier said than done. Scientists face restraints in not only funding, but also in the way science is communicated to the public. The public face the restraints of denial, and the fact that they are asked to believe something that goes against their deeply held view, whether political, religious, or personal.
In the past several years, many scientists have become afflicted

(Belluz, 2016) Their issue isn’t just with the quantity. It’s the way money is handed out that puts pressure on labs to publish a lot of papers, breeds conflict of interest, and encourages scientists to overhype their work. In the United States, academic researchers in the sciences generally cannot rely on university funding alone to pay for their salaries, assistants, and lab costs. Instead, they have to seek outside grants. In many cases the expectations were and often still are that faculty should cover at least 75 percent of the salary on grants. (Belluz,

Though science still holds an esteemed place in America, there is a gap between what scientists and some citizens think. The views we express signal which political group we belong to. The gap between what science shows and what people believe is about our identity. A human being cannot grasp something as a fact if it in anyway undermines their identity. Once people have convinced themselves of something, research suggests facts don’t appeal to them (Dastagir, 2017). Therefore, when an individual encounter a fact that doesn’t support their idea, their idea actually grows