By Min-Fang Huang
Science writing is hard work. Science writers use their energy, passion, and talent to translate abstract science language into plain language. Science writers are proud of their work and believe their work will bring the ivory tower and the mundane world closer. Is it true that readers really get what science writers intend to deliver to them? This question can be answered by research into the science of science communication.
On May 21 and 22, the National Academy of Sciences held a colloquium “The Science of Science Communication” during which dozens of science communication researchers gathered in our nation’s capital to discuss how lay audiences perceive science information. The major goal of this meeting was “to improve the understanding, relations between scientific community and the public,” said NAS President Ralph J. Cicerone.
The meeting surveyed the state of the art of empirical social science research in science communication and focused on research in psychology, decision science, mass communication, risk communication, health communication, political science, sociology, and related fields on the communication dynamics surrounding issues in science, engineering, technology, and medicine.
Meeting goals were to:
- Improve understanding of relations between the scientific community and the public
- Assess the scientific basis for effective communication about science
- Strengthen ties among and between communication scientists
- Promote greater integration of the disciplines and approaches pertaining to effective communication
- Foster an institutional commitment to evidence-based communication science
According to NAS Vice President Barbara A. Schaal, now it’s time to “consider the application and impacts of research that impinge on the public.” Advanced research areas, such as synthetic biology, neurobiology, stem cell, and astrophysics, have challenged the belief systems of the general public.
“Therefore, in order to acquire necessary skills for engaging the general public in science, physical and biological scientists need to learn from social scientists,” she said.
We write, because we want to convey knowledge to people, helping them solve problems or empowering them to get a better life. We want our readers to “learn something.” But during this process, we often neglect the mechanism and biological constrains of learning. When people learn, they need to connect new information with something they already know. This process consumes their energy and time. In addition, memory capacity is limited and many things compete for readers’ attention at the same time: online games, TV shows, celebrity news, jobs, families, to name a few. To earn readers’ attention and to make sure they learn what we intend to offer, we need to change our communication strategies.
Since writing about science doesn’t give us the privilege to attract readers’ full attention, we should try to set foot on the same page as our audience. To get readers to take our message more seriously and to offer them incentives to learn science, we need to know their values, needs, and difficulties, and offer them scientific solutions they can achieve by themselves. To facilitate the learning process, we can also wrap up the scientific content with tangible context, allowing readers to connect the scientific information to their own experience more easily.
The Science of Science Communication was organized by:
- Ralph Cicerone, President, National Academy of Sciences
- Baruch Fischhoff, Carnegie Mellon University
- Alan Leshner, CEO, American Association for the Advancement of Science
- Barbara Schaal, VP, National Academy of Sciences
- Dietram Scheufele, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The event was offered under the auspice of the Sackler Colloquia, a series of interdisciplinary meetings offered annually, since 2001. Funded by a gift from Jill Sackler to honor her late husband, Arthur M. Sackler, the Sackler Colloquia aim to break the barriers between science, arts, and the humanities.
Next year, the Sackler Colloquia will offer a second meeting on the science of science communication.
Min-Fang Huang is a freelance writer and science translator living in San Diego.
Adventures in the science of science communication
By Ben Carollo and Rick Borchelt
On May 21 and 22, the National Academy of Sciences hosted The Science of Science Communication meeting as part of the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia series.
We were very excited when we heard that this meeting was being planned, particularly since it would be taking place in our back yard. The attendees included an interesting mix of science communication practitioners and scientists, both of the social and natural varieties. Note that if you would like any additional information on the speakers or their talks, a full program and archived webcasts can be found at bit.ly/xR3npN. Consider our notes below as teasers for watching the full two days!
The meeting launched with talks from two of the meeting organizers, Baruch Fischhoff and Dietram Scheufele. Fischhoff provided context about the micro view of science communication, or individual responses, while Scheufele provided context about the macro view of science communication, or the social dynamics that come into play. Science communication research often seeks to neatly focus on just one of these buckets, and the presentations reflect that researchers are often looking at one issue or the other. As you all know, however, your work as science writers and PIOs will have equally practical implications on both sides of this continuum. The panels were arranged to provide both perspectives on a topic, but we thought it would be valuable to focus on the presentations and sessions that highlight this complex line between the individual use of science information and social engagement with that information.
Why we can’t trust our intuitions: communication as a science
Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan
Lupia is a political scientist whose lunchtime talk on the first day began to dissect how individuals act as social actors in response to scientific information. His research concluded that nonscientific audiences want information framed in a way that makes it close to them, that is concrete and immediate, and that makes a desired outcome or action possible to achieve. This assumes that there should be an action taken by an individual based on the information. These ideas probably won’t catch you by surprise, but an issue emerges when you put this approach in the context of a political debate or discussion. Lupia’s work suggests that when politicians engage each other and their constituents about scientific issues, the many competing values that overlay the facts involved in the discussion result in difficult to resolve conflicts. These conflicts, in a political system, can devolve into nasty rhetorical debates that where stakeholders find opportunities to manipulate the conversation. As a result, communication games begin where actors in the conversation begin to use the close-immediate-actionable framework to promote action favorable to their interests, regardless of whether the proposed action is supported by the scientific facts at hand. In these circumstances, credibility becomes the overriding factor as opposed to the objective value of science. In this situation, the credibility of a scientist as an expert is not enough. Other social factors have been injected into the debate which means that those individuals or organizations that are seen by stakeholders as being credible on those social issues suddenly have more credibility in these debates.
The implication, of course, is that science communicators must strive to build credibility into the fabric of their work. It is worth reinforcing, as Lupia did, that a simple way to do this is to meet people where they are (intellectually, emotionally, culturally, etc.) and use science as a guide to move them in the direction of collective action. Lupia provided an example of building this short bridge related to climate change. He posited that if a religious leader were interested in engaging his or her congregation in taking action on climate change, the place to start would be not with a sermon about the evils of climate change but with the congregation’s shared values, such as social justice or public health, and the ability to take collective action for the greater good. Only then, Lupia suggests, could one begin the conversation with congregants about climate change and what they can do to take action. In this case, though the focus of the talk was mostly about the complexities and social dynamics at play in a science policy debate, these debates ultimately all are driven by a collection of individuals and their perceptions.
How science is presented and understood in modern mass cultures
Matthew C. Nisbet, American University; William P. Eveland Jr., The Ohio State University; Dominique Brossard, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The second day kicked off with a panel of three individuals who spoke to this issue of individuals consuming science information in a social context. Nisbet spoke to the role that mass media play in shaping public debates about science. His finding, that as issues rise in the media, media consumers will view these issues as more important, won’t be a surprise to readers of this column. Nisbet discussed theories about how the media frames the values associated with the issue that might inform an individual’s perspective on a particular science issue. Additionally, he discussed how many issues will go unnoticed by the general public until a “focusing event” is covered by the media, heightening the public and political attention on an issue. At this juncture in the public discourse activist publics form and advocates get involved, leading to the frequent use of dramatic claims and shifting the discourse away from the technical elements of the issue. This happens, of course, because advocates are interested in creating a policy arena that favors their interests. Unfortunately, this combination of framing factors can narrow the scope of the debate in a deleterious way.
Nisbet used the case of climate change science as an example. The media debate generally has focused on melting glaciers, ice caps, polar bears, and penguins. Though polar bears and penguins are cute and few people would wish them harm, there are other more consequential impacts from climate change. Nisbet noted, for example, that respondents in his surveys never think of climate change as a public health issue. There are serious public health implications from climate change, however, and this frame of reference is significantly closer to most individuals’ value set than polar bears and penguins. The debate is taking place in a different space, though, resulting in a complex segmentation of perspectives on the urgency with which climate change needs to be addressed.
Eveland discussed the effects that the mass media have on knowledge and beliefs. He first outlined the variables that are most important to learning: (education, prior experience, and time constraints), motivation (interest, partisanship, and other social factors), and information availability (physical access and saturation across sources). It was the information availability component that was most prominent in the presentation, in particular the changing nature of how people are accessing news. While there is a decline in the use of television, newspaper, and radio as a primary news source and growth in the use of online news sources, this trend does not hold across all demographics — there is a positive association between education and the use of print news sources and as age decreases use of print news sources decreases. This is important because the coverage and quality of science coverage varies widely across media. Additionally, online news sources allow significantly greater ability for the audience to avoid news that isn’t of primary interest. Accordingly, Eveland suggests that only the most interested parties seek out this science information from electronic sources.
Brossard wrapped up the session by discussing trends in new media usage and how people access science information in this landscape. Traditional views of science communication are redefined in this setting. People now use search engines to find news, read blogs that vary in their levels of objectivity, and share content via commenting functions and various multimedia tools. These tools also create new opportunities for scientists to have direct communication with the public, and survey results indicate that this is an increasingly popular idea with younger scientists. The new media and online news paradigm is one where there is essentially unlimited access to information from anywhere with a mobile data connection, and demographic shifts are leading to more and more people accessing science news only in online formats. So far, so good — this much is well known. Of note, however, is that survey data show that people often seek out science information on a specific topic with a specific goal for using that information. Online environments with search capabilities are ideal for this. This becomes problematic given the way that search engines present information, however. The rank of an electronic resource will be based primarily on page hits, which is thus reinforced by being high on the search result page. Unfortunately, these resources at the top of the search result could be inaccurate or propagandist in nature and most individuals lack the knowledge to truly assess the information at such a level.
Discussion following the presentations raised a very interesting point regarding the culture of online engagement and how this can affect all audiences — the tone of comments in an online forum really do matter. An individual’s perspective on the perceptions of bias in a story will be swayed by the comments following the story or shared about a story in a social networking environment. However, only the most issue-polarized individuals on either end of the issue spectrum are likely to post comments or share the stories. So, this minority of the population has an outsized influence in the broader dialogue on an issue when the discussion takes place in a social media environment, further illustrating how individual information-seeking choices become enmeshed in a greater social context, ultimately influencing public debate on these issues.
Risk communication and risky decision making: from viruses to vaccines
Valerie Reyna, Cornell University
One of the presentations in the closing session was also particularly apropos to the topic at hand. Reyna focused on individuals’ use of the “verbatim” versus the “gist” in decision making. For these purposes, verbatim was defined as precise recall and gist as fuzzy summary recall. As Reyna pointed out, our decisions about even the most complex issues and judgments are driven by the gist of an issue. Decision making is driven by concepts and intuition as opposed to considering a complicated checklist of facts outlined on, say, your standard government website. In the science landscape, this becomes very important since so many critical facts are at play — and mostly ignored. It is often seen in controversial science issues that communicators will skip facts altogether and speak directly to intuition instead. Thus, there is potentially great value in identifying how to harness “valid” intuition, as opposed to something guided by flawed logic. There is still a need to research this concept in more depth, and Reyna indicates that a good place to start would be to construct narratives about science that cue important values for one’s audience. At the end of this presentation, Michael M. Crowe, president of Arizona State University and respondent for this session, noted that figuring out how to speak to intuition will only become more important as science advances, becoming more complicated and technically beyond most people.
A few things Scheufele noted in his opening remarks serve to wrap up many of the issues outlined above. Science is becoming increasingly disconnected from the public due to a collective lack of science background, failures in the infrastructure for learning about emerging technologies, and general lack of public interest in science. Additionally, as sciences issues become significantly more value-laden in the public sphere the focus of dialogue about these issues shifts away from pure science to other signifiers. Finally, the media landscape is changing in such a way that many legacy media outlets have lost the infrastructure — both people and resources — to convey complex concepts to their audiences. As a result, public debate on science issues increasingly is driven by the interaction of heuristics and media framing as opposed to information provided at face value — even by the best-written science stories.
Scholarly Pursuits features articles from the social science research community in the United States and abroad. If you read an article you think would make a good candidate for this column, send it along to rickb@nasw.org.
Ben Carollo leads the issues analysis and response team at the National Cancer Institute at NIH. Rick Borchelt is special assistant for public affairs to the director at the National Cancer Institute at NIH.
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