Five theses on science communication: the public and decision-relevant science, part 2 - Cultural Cognition of Health

This is the second part of a two-part series that recaps a talk I gave at a meeting of the National Academy of Science’s really cool Public Interfaces of the Life Sciences Initiative.

The subject of the talk (slides here) was the public’s understanding of what I called “decision relevant science” (DRS)–meaning science that’s relevant to the decisions that ordinary members of the public make in the course of their everyday lives as consumers, as parents, as citizens, and the like.

Part 1 recounted a portion of the talk that I invited the audience to imagine came from a reality tv show called “Public comprehension of science–believe it or not!,” a program, I said, dedicated to exploring oddities surrounding what the public knows about what’s known to science.  The concluding portion of the talk, which I’ll reconstruct now, presented five serious points –or points that I at least intend to be serious and be taken seriously–about DRS, each of which in fact could be supported by one of the three “strange but true” stories featured in the just-concluded episode of “Public comprehension of science–believe it or not!”

I. Individuals must accept as known more DRS than they can ever possibly understand.

In the first story featured in the show, we learned that individuals belonging to that half of the US population that purports to “believe” in evolution are not more more likely to be able to give a cogent account of the “modern synthesis” (natural selection, genetic variance, and random mutation) than those belonging to the half that asserts “disbelief.”  In fact, very small proportions of either group can give such an account.

Thus, most of the people who quite properly accept evolution as “scientific fact” (including, I’m confident, the vast majority who view those who disbelive in it as pitifully ignorant) believe in something they don’t understand.

That’s actually not a problem, though. Indeed, it’s a necessity !

The number of things known to science that it makes sense for a practical person to accept as true (that a GPS systems, exquisitely calibrated in line with Einstein’s theory of special relativity, will reliably guide him to where he wants to go, for example) far exceed what such an individual could ever hope to comprehend in any meaningful way on his own. Life is too short.

Indeed, it will be a good deal shorter if before accepting that it makes sense not to smoke such a person insists on verifying for himself that smoking causes cancer — or that before taking antibiotics that they do in fact kill disease-causing bacteria but do not — as 50% of the U.S. population thinks– “believe it or not!”–kill viruses.

II. Individuals acquire the insights of DRS by reliably recognizing who has it.

Yet it’s okay, really, for a practical, intelligent person not to acquire the knowledge that antibiotics kill only bacteria and not viruses. He doesn’t have to have an MD to get the benefits of what’s known to medical science.  He only has to know that if he gets sick, the person he should consult and whose advice he should follow i s the doctor . She’s the one who knows what science knows there.

That’s how, in general, individuals get the benefit of DRS–not by understanding it themselves but by reliably recognizing who knows what about what because they know it in the way that science counts as knowing.

Why not go to a faith healer or a shaman when one has a sore throat — or a cancerous legion or persistent hacking cough? Actually, some very tiny fraction of the population does. But that underscores only that there really are in fact people out there whose “knowledge” on matters of consequence to ordinary people’s lives are not ones that science would recognize and that precious few people (in a modern liberal market society) treat them as reliable sources of knowledge.

Ordinary people reliably make use of all manner of DRS — medical science is only one of many kinds — not because they are experts on all the matters to which DRS speaks but because they are themselves experts at discerning who knows what’s known to science.

III.  Public conflict over DRS is a recognition problem, not a comprehension problem.

Yet ordinary members of the public do disagree–often quite spectacularly–about certain elements of DRS. These conflicts are not a consequence of defects in public comprehension of science, however. They are a product of the the failure of ordinary members of the public to converge in the exercise of their normal and normally reliable expert ability to recognize who knows what about what.

Believe it or not, one can work out this conclusion logically on the basis of information related in the “Public Comprehension of Science–Believe it or Not!” show.

Members of the public, we learned, are (1) divided on climate science and (2) don’t understand it (indeed, the ones who “believe” in it, like the ones who believe in evolution, generally don’t have a meaningful understanding of what they believe).

But (2) doesn’t cause (1).  If it did, we’d expect members of the public to be divided on zillions of additional forms of DRS on which they in fact are not .  Like the efficacy of antibiotics, which half the population believes (mistakenly) kill viruses.

Or pasteurized milk.  No genuine cultural conflict over that, at least in the US.  And the reason isn’t that people have a better grasp of biology than they do of climate science. Rather it’s that there, as with the health benefits of antibiotics, they are reaching the same conclusion when they exercise their rational capacity to recognize who knows what science knows on this matter.