How To Communicate Science to a Polarized US Audience

Prescott writes "Given the divisions in the US around subjects like evolution and climate change, scientists face challenges in how to communicate good science to a polarized US public. Speakers at the recent AAAS meeting talked about how scientific information is delivered to and understood by a public that interprets it via personal beliefs, religious and otherwise. 'The talks were organized by Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communications who is a proponent of the framing of science, in which communications techniques borrowed from the political realm are applied to promote scientific understanding. As such, a number of speakers advocated specific frames for publicly controversial scientific issues. Unfortunately, the use of those frames appears likely to generate controversy within the scientific community, and several speakers noted that science faces challenges that go well beyond communicating knowledge to the public. There were some hints of a way forward that might work for both the scientific community and the public, but the challenges appear significant.'"

Comments

Re:Science of Political Agenda?

[darjen]

How can science avoid talking about political agendas when most research funding comes from the political arena?

Re:Science of Political Agenda?

[Russ Nelson]

In early 2007, I was consulting in India, when a bunch of superstitious idiots tasted the (polluted) water coming from Mahim Creek into the ocean. It tasted sweet, not salty! Of course that was probably due to contamination from some chemical like antifreeze or something. Yet there are these idiots, proclaiming a miracle by one of India's gods. Some Indian scientist looked at the water and said "Holy fucking gods, you morons are DRINKING THIS STUFF??" or something like that. Did that stop them? Nope. The only thing that stopped them was when the pollution disappated and the water turned salty again.

I don't blame Indians for this, of course. There are a-scientific morons everywhere. Some of them even post on Slashdot.

Re:Perhaps rasta-fy the science 10% or so

[Quiet_Desperation]

Communications techniques borrowed from the political realm will not help to promote scientific understanding, because those techniques were not designed to promote understanding. I need to consider it for a while, but could this be a case of the street finding it's own use? You think Berners-Lee had amazon.com in mind when he created HTML?

Poli-comm may not have been designed to promote understanding, but that does not mean it cannot be used as such by clever people. I can see how methods designed to obscure facts and be use to instead reveal them.