When it comes to honesty or ethical standards, common stereotypes appear to apply to professions or career fields. Nurses, pharmacists, and doctors — considered to be in “healing” occupations — rank the highest, while the old typecast of the “used car salesman” persists, with car salespeople ranking near the bottom in honesty and ethics. Politicians — especially those working for the federal government — remain in low esteem, mirroring a commonly held distrust of the federal government that has developed in the U.S. in the past 40 to 50 years.

This survey shows these long-held stereotypes are difficult to shake. The relative resurgence of nursing home operators perhaps shows that as scandals fade and the population becomes more elderly, opinions about these practitioners are rising. Yet for the most part, in the past decade, perceptions of certain career fields have remained consistent.

If views of a certain profession have changed, it usually has been a function of scandal surrounding it. The Catholic priest abuse stories from the early 2000s helped lead to a sharp drop in Americans’ ratings of clergy, a decline from which the profession has yet to fully recover.