Principal Findings
We conducted a large, preregistered, randomized controlled trial to test whether the addition of normative language to cognitive language about face masks in otherwise identical social media posts influenced 5 different measures of trust and credibility of science and scientists. As we outlined in our “Introduction” section as well as in our protocol paper [We also prespecified that we would conduct the same analyses while including an interaction term for study arm × political orientation. We made that decision because an association between political orientation and trust in science was observed in the validation and development study for the scale we used to measure overall trust in science and scientists (Nadelson et al [