Wild wild horses couldn't drag me away: four "principles" for science communication and policymaking - Cultural Cognition of Health

Was invited to give a presentation on “effective science communication” for the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council committee charged with preparing a report on wild horse & burro population management.

I happily accepted, for two reasons.

First, it really heartens and thrills me that the NAS gets the importance of integrating science and policymaking, on the one hand, with the science of science communication on the other. Indeed, as the NAS’s upcoming Sackler Colloquium on the Science of Science Communication attests, NAS is leading the way here.

Second, it only took me about 5 minutes of conversation with Kara Laney, the NAS Program Officer who is organizing the NRC committee’s investigation of wild horse population management, to persuade me that the science communication dimension of this issue is fascinating. The day I spent at the committee’s meeting yesterday corroborated that judgment.

Not knowing anything about the specifics of wild-horse population management (aside from what everyone picks up just from personal experience & anecdote, etc), I confined myself to addressing research on the “science communication problem” — the failure of ample and widely disseminated science to quiet public dispute over policy-relevant facts that admit of scientific investigation. Like debates over climate change, HPV vacccination, nuclear power, etc. ,  the dispute over wild-horse management falls squarely into that category.

After summarizing some illustrative findings (e.g., on the biasing impact of cultural outlooks on perceptions of scientific consensus ; click on image for slides), I offered “four principles”:

First, science communication is a science .

Seems obvious–especially after someone walks you through 3 or 4 experiments — but in fact, the assumption that sound science communicates itself is the origin of messes like the one over climate change. As I said, NAS is now committed to remedying the destructive consquences of this attitude, but one can’t overemphasize how foolish it is to invest so much in policy-relevant science and then adopt a wholly ad hoc anti -scientific stance toward the dissemination of it.

Second, “science communication” is not one thing; it’s 5 ( ± 2).

Until recent times, those who thought systematically about science communication were interetested either in helping scientists learn to speak in terms intelligible to curious members of the public or in training science journalists to understand and accurately decipher scientists’ unintelligible pronouncements.

These are important things. But the idea that inarticulate scientists or bad journalists caused the climate change controversy, say, or that making scientists or journalists better communicators will solve that or other problems involving science and democratic decsionmaking is actually a remnant of the unscientific concepion of science communication– a vestiges, really, of the idea that “facts speak for themselves,” just so long as they are idiomatic, grammatical, etc.

As I explained in my talk, the disputes over climate change, the HPV vaccine, nuclear power, and gun control are not a consequence of a lack of clarity in science or a lack of science comprehension on the part of ordinary citizens.

The source of those controversies is a form of pollution in the science communication environment: antagonistic social meanings that get attached to facts and that interfere with the normally reliable capacity of ordinary people to figure out what’s known (usually by identifying who knows what about what).

Detoxifying the science communication environment and protecting it from becoming contaminated in the first place is thus another kind of “science communication,” one that has very little to do with helping scientists learn to avoid professional jargon when they give interviews to journalists, who themselves have been taught how to satisfy the interest that curious citizens have to participate in the thrill and wonder of our collective intelligence.

Those two kinds of science communication, moreover, are different from the sort that an expert like a doctor or a finanancial planner has to engage in to help individuals make good decisions about their own lives. The emerging scientific insights on graphic presentation of data etc. also won’t help fix problems like ones about climate change.

Still another form of science communication is the sort that is necessary to enable policymakers to make reliable and informed decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The NAS is taking the lead on this too — and isn’t laboring under the misimpression that what causes climate change is the “same thing” that has made judges accept finger prints and other bogus forms of forensic proof.

Finally, there is stakeholder science communication — the transmission of knowledge to ordinary citizens who are intimately affected by and who have (or are at least entiled to have) a say in collective decisionmaking. That’s mainly what the decisionmaking process surrounbding the wild-horse population is about.  There are scientific insights there, too– ones having very little to do with graphic presentation of data  or with good writing skills or with the sort of pollution problem that is responsible for climate change.

Third, “don’t ask what science communication can do for you ; ask what you can do for science communication.”

Having just told the committee that their “science communication problem” is one distinct from four others, I anticipated what I was sure would be their next question: “so what do we do?”

Not surprisingly, that’s what practical people assigned to communicate always ask when they are engaging scholars who use scientific methods to study science communication. They want some “practical” advice–directions, instructions, guidelines.