Getting The Public To Listen To Good Science

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "We all know that false or misleading science headlines are all too common these days and that misleading media combined with an apathetic and undereducated public lead to widespread ignorance. But the real question is, how can this trend be reversed? At a session at the recent AAAS meeting, a study was discussed indicating that what matters most is how the information is portrayed. While people are willing to defer to experts on matters of low concern, for things that affect them directly, such as breast cancer or childhood diseases, expertise only counts for as much as giving off a 'sense of honesty and openness,' and that it matters far less than creating a sense of empathy in deciding who people will listen to. In other words, it's not enough to merely report on it as an expert. You need to make sure your report exudes a sense of honesty, openness, empathy, and maybe even a hint of humor."

Comments

Re:Entertainment value

[ResidntGeek]

find a tooth fragment and say that they have found something from a dinosaur that would have been 25 ft long and run at 40 mph. What bullshit.

Not a paleontologist, are you? Teeth are very diagnostic, and very often well-preserved and documented. If you find a tooth dead center in a Kimmeridgian-stage formation which perfectly matches a tooth from the holotype specimen of Stegosaurus armatus, for example, it's not bullshit to say the tooth came from a dinosaur with 17 armored plates on its back - even if it sounds like it.

Re:immunization

[ceoyoyo]

Uh huh. Sure it is. Got any real references? You talk about "scientific realities" but I don't see any peer reviewed references. Even if you come up with a bad vaccination that might do harm to a small minority of recipients, occasionally (which happens - we just had a bad batch of mumps vaccine during an outbreak about three months ago), that is a LONG way from showing that getting vaccinated in general is a bad idea. Please note the conspicuous absence of polio (which can cause paralysis to the point where the victim may not be able to breathe unassisted), rubella, (which causes all sorts of nasty effects if a pregnant woman gets it), smallpox (which kills or maims), measles (estimated to have killed 200 million worldwide in the last 150 years), and mumps (can cause infertility and hearing loss). Yes, those are wikipedia articles. Yes, each one references the important statements with multiple peer reviewed sources.

Take mumps for example (probably the least dangerous of the group). In that outbreak I mentioned, with the tainted vaccine, there were three people who had mild allergic reactions. No long term damage. The nasty side effects from mumps are fairly rare, but without a vaccine the disease used to be VERY common, so those rare complications affected a good number of people. Far more than are hurt (even in minor ways) by the vaccine itself.

I realise I'm probably wasting my time replying, but you never know.