ABSTRACT
Science and technology have achieved many remarkable successes, but it would be difficult to argue that dealing well with the public should be counted among them. Even “hard scientists,” after all, often learn about other scientific fields from the “news pages” of journals such as Science, and it is hard to imagine how else most members of the public would get their information. The underlying reasons involve a different kind of chemistry than is normally studied in a laboratory setting — a strange kind of interpersonal chemistry that often seems as exotic to scientists and engineers as the real chemical compounds can seem to members of the general public. The growth in interdependence, and in the risks of recreancy, appear to be among the reasons why trust and trustworthiness have also been found to be key variables in a growing range of other studies.
