Colloquium with Josef Lolacher
The Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) cordially invites you to attend our next colloquium in our lecture series. On Tuesday, November 24, 2026, from 14:00 to 15:00. Our guest is Josef Lolacher, University of Oxford, UK. His talk will be titled "Expertise or Majority Opinion? How Citizens and Politicians Weigh Scientific Evidence Against Public Opinion".
The colloquium will be held in English at the Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID) at the Trier University (Building D, Room D 141, Universitätsring 15, 54296, Trier) and also online. If you want to attend the colloquium online, please email us at madr@leibniz-psychology.org and we will send you the link to the online event. You don’t need to register to attend in person.
Abstract
Modern democracies increasingly rely on scientific expertise to tackle complex problems from climate change to public health. Yet on many salient policy questions, expert recommendations and majority opinion point in opposite directions, forcing decision-makers to weigh what experts advise against what citizens want. How do citizens and the politicians who represent them navigate this tension? How much weight do they give to scientific expertise, and how do their broader views about science and the role of experts in politics differ?
The talk approaches these questions from a political-psychological perspective, drawing on an original parallel citizen–elite research design. Survey experiments present citizens in Austria, Germany, the UK, and the US, alongside sitting national and regional parliamentarians in the three European countries, with truthful information about expert judgement and majority opinion across real-world policy controversies. By confronting both groups with comparable information, the design provides a direct comparison of how citizens and politicians respond to these two sources, particularly when they conflict. Additional measures of trust in scientists and attitudes toward technocratic governance extend the analysis beyond individual policy choices to citizens’ and politicians’ broader relationships with science and expertise. Together, the findings illuminate how citizens and political elites weigh expert knowledge against public opinion, how their broader orientations toward science and expertise differ, and what these similarities and differences imply for the role of scientific expertise in democratic decision-making.