A gentle critique of science literacy
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Presentation to the World Conference on Science Literacy in September 2018 in which I argue that science literacy is just one of many difference communication objectives that scientists might pursue through their communication efforts.
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A gentle critique of science literacy
- 1. In collaboration with Anthony Dudo, UTexas This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF, Grant AISL 14241214-421723. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. PhotobytheCDC
- 2. John Besley, Ph.D. (2006: Cornell, Communication) Ellis N. Brandt Professor MSU Department of Advertising and Public Relations @JohnBesley
- 3. Would you be happy if you only increased awareness, knowledge, or interest ? Knowledge Interest Others? Communication Objectives Goals Goals?Tactics?
- 4. Core Question: What is the goal of science communication? Stephen R. Sylvanie/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
- 5. FlickrCreativecommons:RobertCouse-Baker‘IMG_1760;RussellJamesSmith,‘NoChange’,CharlesDPMiller,Justice Support/Not oppose Change behavior Long-term Legitimacy
- 6. The thing about knowledge, attitudes and behavior …
- 7. What do people know about science?
- 9. Meta-analysis suggests a small (.08) relationship between knowledge and attitudes Does science knowledge lead to science support?
- 12. 1 Released, October 2016 “Available research does not support the claim that increasing science literacy will lead to appreciably greater support for science in general.” (or specific policies)
- 13. Flickr Creative Commons: dan hodgett, ‘an invitation’ Sharing knowledge will always be important
- 14. Clear + Focused > Unclear and Rambling (i.e., little jargon, active voice, clear point, understandable) Flickr Creative Commons: Mark Hunger ‘Focus’
- 15. Lots of good books …
- 17. Attitudes are the sum of available beliefs (b) and the evaluation (e) of those beliefs
- 18. If we take the term “engagement” seriously … How ‘engagement fosters beliefs …
- 20. What beliefs could ‘engagement’ foster? Perceived caring/honest Perceived listening/open Perceived competence Perceived similarity Smile, eparles; Listen, Montse PB; Brothers, Marie-Clair Camp; State Farm, Graduation & Safe Driving, all via Flickr Creative Commons (not uncaring or dishonest) (not disconnected) (not ‘elitists’ ) (not incompetent )
- 21. What other beliefs could we try to foster? Risks & benefits (attitudes/ emotions) What other people do and expect (norms) Whether something works and your ability (efficacy) Flickr creative commons: Seyed Mostofa Zamani, Paul Skeie; also Top Gear website
- 22. Half what? Kaylan Chakrvarthy via Flickr Creative Commons Framing: How should we see this glass?
- 23. You can’t do everything …
- 24. Communication objectives GoalsTactics + knowledge, interest, and various emotions
- 25. Final thoughts … There are no silver bullets Our beliefs must also be open to change It takes time and a community
- 26. Some of our research … Besley, J. C., & Dudo, A. (2017). Scientists’ Views about Public Engagement and Science Communication in the Context of Climate Change. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Climate Change Communication. Besley, J. C., Dudo, A., & Storksdieck, M. (2015). Scientists' views about communication training. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 52, 199-220. Besley, J. C., Dudo, A., & Yuan, S. (In Press). Scientists’ views about communication objectives. Public Understanding of Science. doi: 10.1177/0963662517728478 Besley, J. C., Dudo, A., Yuan, S., & AbiGhannam, N. (2016). Qualitative interviews with science communication trainers about communication objectives and goals. Science Communication, 38, 356-381. Besley, J. C., Dudo, A., Yuan, S., & Lawrence, F. (In Press). Understanding scientists’ willingness to engage. Science Communication. Dudo, A., & Besley, J. C. (2016). Scientists’ prioritization of communication objectives for public engagement PLoS ONE, 11. Yuan, S., Oshita, T., AbiGhannam, N., Dudo, A., Besley, J. C., & Koh, H. E. (In press). Two-way communication between scientists and the public: a view from science communication trainers in North America. International Journal of Science Education, Part B.
- 27. If you have 800 words … 100 150 150 300 100 RISKS faced by communities Researchers motivation to help (WARMTH) What was done to listen to communities (LISTENING) Scientific findings (KNOWLEDGE) What can be done (EFFICACY) If you have 60 minutes … 5 5 20 5 25 RISKS faced by communities Researchers shared values with audience (IDENTITY) Scientific findings (KNOWLEDGE) Potential solutions (EFFICACY) Discussion/Questions (LISTENING) + Tactics that may take resources but don’t take time/ space (clothing, tone, frame, venue/channel, timing, etc.)
Editor's Notes
- Background on me …
- Looking at the responses as they rolled in I was happy to see a few different things but I also wasn’t surprised to see a lot of people mention that they saw the goal of communication as sharing information [or even fighting misinformation]. That’s a totally normal response but it’s also the one I’m going to spend some time pushing back on in the hour we have. And I’m going to do that for two reasons. The first is that I’m going to argue that sharing information and getting people interested in a topic isn’t what we should see as the goal of communication. I’m going to call that as two potential objectives of communication. We’re going to spend most of our time today talk about other objectives beyond knowledge and interest but I want to spend a little bit of time first talking about what I see as meaningful communication goals. We’ll also touch a little bit on tactics and how they relate to objectives and goals along the way …
- The place I usually start with these types of discussions is to ask the participants to tell me what they want to accomplish through communication. What’s their goal? In this case, we can’t do it orally but I’d love for people to type in what they see as a primary goal for communication? This should be the first question that any communication professional asks you when you sit down to start talking about a new project and I’m going to argue it should be your starting point as well when you think about putting time and resources into communication activity. I’m curious to see what you all type in but I guess I should also warn you that I usually end up pushing back on what people enter.
- I didn’t always think this way but I’ve come to be pretty convinced that if you really push most scientists they’ll eventually agree that they want to see something happen because of their communication efforts and that ‘thing’ can usually be categorized as some sort of behavior. The behavior might be civic in nature and involved having people support or oppose some policy or the use of science in policy and sometimes it’s more focused around behaviors like buying or avoiding certain types of products. On the policy side, it’s also important to recognize the difference between explicit support or opposition versus implicit or support or opposition. For example, I’m not sure that proponents of genetically engineered need support as much as they need people to spend their time thinking about other things. That being said, one of my favorite bodies of research deals with the concept of procedural fairness and I think the idea of legitimacy represents an important type of tacit support that a lot of science and risk communicators often want. In this regard, I think of legitimacy as the idea that someone can accept a decision that they don’t necessarily support. Whatever the case, the key thing for me is that these are not things like knowledge or interest. They’re behaviors, at loosely defined.
- A related problem often crops up, however, even if people are able to identity a behavior they want to see happen. What often happens is that we fall into the trap of thinking that the best way to get behavior change is to change people’s beliefs about what scientific research tells us about that behavior.
- I think this is a pretty natural trap for people like us who have spent so much time in classrooms and books. And it’s easy to point to lots of evidence, some of which help produce through things like Science and Engineering Indicators that people don’t know very much about science in general or any given scientific topic.
- And it’s not just science literacy that people think is problem. Every field seems to think that the world would be better if everyone just knew more about their area of interest.
- The problem – and I know a lot of you know this – is that there’s not a lot of evidence that increasing people’s general or specific scientific knowledge will change people’s behavior. In my world, this is typically called a knowledge deficit approach to changing behavior although Dan Kahan has also called it the science comprehension thesis. Nick Allum from the UK did a really nice meta-analysis more than a decade ago that did a nice job showing the small relationship between knowledge and attitudes and I was on a National Academies committee a couple of years ago where we dove into this literature once again but the conclusion was what people in science and risk communication have known for some time: You can’t simply teach people to change their behavior. We therefore need to think about other possible objectives.
- And I am definitely not saying that sharing scientific knowledge isn’t an important part of science and risk communication. It’s why people come to hear us or invite us to come share our work. My point is only that sharing the results of your research or your field’s research is just one type of content you can share. It’s one objective in just minute we’re going to talk about other ones. I promise.
- One last thing though before we get to some objectives is that I want highlight that I’m not going to spend any specific time today talking about writing clearly and without jargon on things like story telling. I think we can all agree that you’re probably better to communication clearly.
- And there are lots of good books aimed at helping you speak and write in a clear and compelling way.
- The interesting thing for me is that most of the science communication books that are on the market right now and most of the training that people get in science communication is focused around things like giving a clear, jargon-free elevator pitch. That’s interesting to me because I think that’s what a lot of people think communication is … but we have about 100 research faculty in my college and I don’t know that any of them spend time studying clear writing and speaking or jargon. We definitely help our students – especially our journalism, advertising, and PR students – write clearly but it’s not what we research.
- On the quantitative side, what most of us study is something about how communication affects various attitudes or beliefs or feelings and how the sum of those changes might affect behavior.
- It turns out there’s a lot of us because there’s a lot of different things you can study. If you just think about the idea of a belief. There’s lots of different options. We can understand scientific knowledge as correct beliefs about how the world works but there’s lots of other types of beliefs too.
- The beliefs I have typically cared the most about in my research are those associated with trust … One problem with the idea of trust in general is that it’s not really clear enough to be a communication objective. But if you say that you want to choose to prioritize being seen as honest and caring then we can start thinking of tactics that might make that possible. What might such tactics be? At the most basic, if you want to be seen as warm you should be nice and try to smile. More substantially, if you research a topic because you want to make the world better, you might consider sharing that information with your audience. Of course, that’s not true, you can’t say it but if it is true, you might use a little bit of your time or space to let people know. Similarly, if want to be perceived as listening or giving voice, you might do things like really listen to people while making sure that people know you’re listening, have listened in the past, and will continue to listen in the future. The same thing goes for being seen as not-so-different and competent. You have often have to take time if you’re speaking or space if you’re writing to share that information but what the reason we like to focus on clarifying objectives is that it open up a discussion of the tactics you might use to achieve those objectives, including what you might say or do … These are typically the variables that seem to be good predictors of goals such as policy support and legitimacy. Communication researchers have also shown that these types of variables are good predictors of whether or not someone will even listen to what you have to say. How do you know if you should focus on these objectives? The idea of insight in an advertising brief? Don’t forget to mention ethics …
- There’s one other objective I want to talk about briefly and that’s the idea of framing. Framing gets a bad name because people think of it is spin but I think communication researchers just think of it as another choice you either have to make consciously or unconsciously. Strategic communicators recognize that they have choices in how to accurately describe the same thing.