The Science of Science Communication II Summary of a Colloquium (2014) / Chapter Skim
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2 Science in a Time of Controversy
2 Science in a Time of Controversy
Pages 35-74
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From page 35... ...
Social scientists were asked to bridge the gap from their controlled studies to the complex world in which communication actually takes place. Science communicators were asked to 35
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From page 36... ...
The object of the colloquium was to foster innovative thinking and fruitful new collaborations through interactions that would not have occurred otherwise. RESPONDING TO THE ATTACK ON THE BEST AVAILABLE EVIDENCE Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, began her keynote address on the second day of the colloquium by looking at two broad communities that are involved in science communication.
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From page 37... ...
For example, nonpartisan institutions such as the Congressional Budget Office can be attacked as not using the best available evidence and methods but instead articulating a partisan position. Similarly, politicians may attack journalists as partisan when reporting infringes on their ability to construct a reality for the electorate.
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Journalists can err both by failing to report on consensus and by assuming a consensus that does not in fact exist. Besides conveying the presence or absence of consensus, science communications need to be nonpartisan, so that they can counter partisan filters.
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Rewriting Headlines Jamieson used several examples to illustrate her points, one of which involved the following 2013 headline from the New York Times: "Arctic Ice Makes Comeback from Record Low, but Long-Term Decline May Continue" This headline frames the issues discussed in the article in a highly misleading way, Jamieson contended. It fails to point out that the long-term trend in Arctic sea ice has been steadily downward.
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From page 40... ...
made the point that early engagement and dialogue can achieve several critical ends: • Incorporating public values in decisions, • Improving decision quality, • Resolving conflict, • Establishing trust and legitimacy, and • Education and information. Upstream engagement also has several obvious difficulties, Pidgeon continued.
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A Framework for Responsible Innovation In response to the controversy, the SPICE researchers were asked to address five criteria before the pipe and balloon test could go ahead. One was to identify mechanisms to understand wider public and stakeholder views regarding envisaged applications and impacts of the experiment.
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From page 42... ...
But scientists and science communicators need to be very careful with what they do upstream, "because what we put in the water upstream we end up drinking downstream." One issue is that consensus needs to exist that a particular problem is worth discussing, Hallman said. Once this consensus exists, discussion can proceed on whether a particular technology is the right way to solve a problem.
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One possibility is that engagement will create an arms race downstream over issues. In general, the upstream environment is rarely free of the controversies that upstream engagement presupposes, Borchelt said.
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, incorporated the half plate of fruits and vegetables into a much more schematic treatment of the five food groups. This revision "definitely has the potential to help people follow nutrition science," she said.
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Many science communications are not actionable, added Borchelt. Indeed, science communicators often would prefer that scientific information not be dragged into a political arena where it can be used to justify action of one kind of another.
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"I will attend the Sackler webinar on the Science of Communications." 2. "I will not attend the Sackler webinar on the Science of Communications." The fourth option is enhanced active choice, in which the choices specify the advantages of choosing that option.
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Enhanced active choice can be personal, motivating, and interactive, which can help engage someone who would otherwise be uninvolved. Encouraging Behaviors As an example, Keller cited an enhanced active choice involving flu shots for hospital employees.
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Enhanced Active Choice to Serve Science Like upstream engagement, enhanced active choice is a tool, noted Borchelt. For science communication, a relevant question is whether the enhancement can incorporate science.
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This amount of power and connectivity could make science relevant to the choices people make every day, and science communicators could help make that possibility a reality. Social media also have changed the nature of engagement, said Zandan.
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Intelligence, creativity, and social savvy may be needed to create a popular video, but the potential to do so is not limited to business. Moreover, with a billion people a day using social media, even a penny per day from each of them to support science communication would represent a large amount of money.
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From page 51... ...
INFLUENCES OF SOCIAL MEDIA For decades, social science research has reflected a dichotomy between mass media that broadcast to large undifferentiating audiences and interpersonal communication among people talking with each other, observed Duncan Watts, principal researcher at Microsoft Research. But this traditional dichotomy has been dissolving.
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But not all people are equally influential. A category of people called opinion leaders act as filters between the mass media and the masses.
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Social science typically has relied on surveys, experiments, interviews, and ethnographies, but now it can test theories at scale using data provided by social media. However, it is
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This particular group and network would be a valuable case study for social scientists to examine the real-world consequences of social networks, Jardin said. CHARTING SCIENCE CHATTER THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA According to Deb Roy, professor at MIT and chief media scientist at Twitter, television and Twitter are intersecting to create a new hybrid form of communication.
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Twitter is public, so that tweets can flow freely within the network but also pop up on the front page of the New York Times. It also is a fast medium, where the chances of someone reading a tweet drop off rapidly with time.
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One big difference between social media today and the Usenet conversations, said Jardin, is that today's social platforms are privately owned spaces. Perhaps something is being lost by not having a public forum in which these conversations can occur.
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A 1-standard-deviation increase in the time a story spends as the lead article on the New York Times homepage increased its likelihood of making the most e-mailed list by about 20 percent. As hypothesized, more interesting, surprising, and useful articles were more likely to make the list.
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From page 58... ...
They then recruited a separate panel of 8,000 nonscientists to rate a randomly selected scientific summary, and they averaged these ratings to create a measure of how likely an article is to be widely shared. The results show that findings published in psychology journals are the most likely to be widely shared, followed by economics journals, sociology journals, and, finally, science journals.
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From page 59... ...
On that note, Watts added during the discussion session that every scientific message is not simple, every lesson is not easily digestible, and every result is not intuitive. Making complicated scientific results bite sized, palatable, and competitive with all other media risks undermining the work.
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However, narratives also raise ethical considerations about when and how to use them to communicate science. A narrative is a causally linked temporal sequence of events involving specific, human-like characters, said Dahlstrom, adding "You might also call it telling a story." Narratives are processed differently than are evidence-based arguments.
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These observations raise serious questions about the ethics of using narratives to communicate science. First, is the underlying purpose for using narrative improved comprehension or improved persuasion?
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• Can narratives help communicate science beyond human scale? Human perceptual systems experience a very thin ribbon of reality.
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They are directed not just at individuals but at the social groups within which people live. HOW SCIENTISTS TALK TO ONE ANOTHER ABOUT THEIR SCIENCE -- AND WHAT THE PUBLIC HEARS How do scientists actually communicate with each other, asked Kevin Dunbar, professor of human development and quantitative methodology at the University of Maryland in College Park.
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Using Stories to Communicate Science Dunbar's observations are a powerful argument for interdisciplinarity in science, said Green. They also shed light on how narratives can be used to reach particular types of audiences.
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Yet the drama of science is obscured in scientific papers, which are reverse engineered so that the outcome looks inevitable. Scientific papers are written from the perspective of "first-person invisible," said Kaplan, with the process of science removed from the scientific results.
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The goal is a narrative that people understand in the proper way, that explains the science comprehensibly, and that urges action in the appropriate circumstances. A Narrative Targeting Sexual Decisions Downs used the example of a narrative that helps teens avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection.
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From page 67... ...
They also explain reproductive physiology and attack misconceptions about, for example, how infections are transmitted. A 6-month randomized controlled trial involving 300 subjects found that this approach resulted in decreased risky sexual behaviors and decreased sexually transmitted infections.
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vulnerability to sea level rise and coastal flooding.
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We made localized sea level projections at more than 50 water level stations, but also integrated them with local flood statistics to generate forecasts of flood risk, not just sea level. So we want to show sea level projections, annual flood risk projections, cumulative flood risk projections, plus how climate change multiplies risk, for each decade, and for 10 different water levels.
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From page 70... ...
And that the feeling fits the stakes and, ultimately, that action fits the stakes. I keep seeing surveys that show people ranking climate change low on their issue priority list.
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GAB – And "optimistic" seems to make people think sea level rise isn't a problem at all. Listen to this: "That there's hope, it's okay that the sea level is rising, because it's rising slowly and we won't see any dramatic change soon.
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GAB – Good point. I think 2050 may be our sweet spot because it's far enough off to have a real sea level rise effect, but not much more than a 30-year mortgage away.
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BEN – We broke the individual pages into sections, too. For example, with sea level rise and flooding projections in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can choose between the simple slow-through-fast sea-level rise scenarios we worked on labeling, how much carbon do you think we're going to put in the air, how lucky do you think we'll be, and how long do you think you'll live?
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From page 74... ...
By making the invisible visible, these data provide scientists with information that they have never had before. Third, collaborations involving business, scientists, and science communicators offer great potential, and not only in areas where science can help business sell more products.
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