Learning to Communicate
A great article by Chris Mooney on the need for scientists to adopt better strategies for communicating with the public. A central point:
[Scientists] assume that if only their fellow Americans knew more about science and ceased to be in a state of knowledge deficit, a healthier relationship between science and the public would emerge. Yet there is another possibility: perhaps scientists misunderstand the public and fail to connect in part because of their own quirks, assumptions, and patterns of behavior. Indeed, there is no guarantee that increasing scientific literacy among the public would change core responses on contested scientific issues, for those responses are rarely conditioned by purely scientific considerations. Scientists and non-scientists often have very different perceptions of risk, different ways of bestowing their trust, and different means of judging the credibility of information sources. Moreover, members of the public strain their responses to scientific controversies through their ethics or value systems, as well as through their political or ideological outlooks—which regularly trump calm, dispassionate scientific reasoning. The powerful influence of politics and ideology is underscored by a rather shocking survey result: Republicans who are college graduates are considerably less likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate change than those who have received less education. These better-educated Republicans could hardly be said to suffer a knowledge deficit; a more apt explanation is that they are politically driven consumers of climate science information—and often quite voracious ones at that. They strain information through a powerful ideological sieve and end up loudly supporting a viewpoint that is incompatible with modern scientific understanding.
The problems scientists are facing with communicating findings on such things as vaccines and global climate change, vaccines shows the real need for better training in communication skills.
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on Fri, Jul 02, 11:07AM
Geoff,
Wow - thanks for bringing up the Mooney article. I couldn't agree more myself. My grad school classmate Naomi Oreskes has just come out with her book The Merchants of Doubt where she talks about the skillful role that a handful of scientists (three, actually) played in sowing doubt on a host of issues including second hand smoke, the ozone hole and climate change. Scientists would dearly prefer to be able to communicate the facts and let the politicians debate the course of action. But when one side doesn't like the proposed course of action, can anyone be surprised if they dispute the facts? The challenge that "Science" has as a community (in the US at least) is to project truth without feeling the need to choose one faction over another. Both political parties use and science when it aligns with their agenda and abuse science when it does not. Scientists need to figure out how not to simply ping-pong back and forth across the political aisle depending on the issue (on climate - we're Democrats; on GMO foods - we're Republicans...) Rather, scientists need to triangulate from a third position: one that upholds factual analysis, proposes practicable solutions, and engages both sides rather than chooses between them.
