Bridging the Gap: Transforming Science Communication to Rebuild Trust
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched with confusion as my friends argued back and forth in the comments section of an Instagram post I had made.
My post, I thought, was fairly non-combative: as a graduate researcher in Biology, I believed in the science that went into developing the COVID-19 vaccine and hoped that my loved ones were looking to research-backed sources to inform their decisions about getting it. As a scientist, this felt like pretty basic stuff.
To my surprise, even among my friends (many of whom are college educated, hold similar values, and live similar lifestyles) disagreements, opinions, and conjectures were flying about wildly. Within my small subsample of friends, no one could agree on the statistics. Some shared misinformation, and many were emotionally charged and combative. I had unknowingly hit a nerve with many of them and I was struck by how this all must have been playing out in our society at large.
Setting the Scene: The Importance of Science Communication
While people have different life experiences, cultural contexts, and beliefs that shape their worldviews and opinions of science, I believe one of the biggest threats to humanity and our planet might be the lack of public trust in science. I do not think the public is necessarily to blame though. The issue lies in how science is communicated, and the blind spots we scientists can have when it comes to relating to non-scientists. Many of our attempts to communicate scientific research findings to public audiences have been ineffective and at times have acted to reduce public trust in our work. Scientists once claimed a position in society as all-knowing experts that should always be trusted, but after years of elitism, historical injustices, and underrepresentation of society’s diversity, attitudes toward the role of scientists in our society have changed. This change has been accelerated by the public’s infinite access to information from a plethora of sources, some more and some less reliable.
Science Communication is a catchall phrase for the various ways scientific information is relayed to various audiences. It can take the form of scientific publications, YouTube videos, public talks and lectures, guides, blog posts and websites, and its primary goal is to disseminate scientific information to the audiences that might need it most. Traditionally however, many in the scientific community felt that publishing complex, jargon-filled scholarly papers accessible only to other academics was communication enough, leaving the general public to fend for itself. This approach has turned out to be intensely ineffective.
In recent decades, Science Communication (shortened to “scicomm”) has gained traction in the scientific community as global crises like biodiversity loss, climate change, and pandemics necessitate scientific intervention and collective action. In the 1980’s, scientists called for more attention to be placed on increasing public understanding of science and since then, science communication efforts have proliferated. Today, scientists face the extra challenge of combating the misinformation that so easily spreads through internet and social media channels. As we saw play out during the COVID-19 pandemic, accessing accurate scientific information can even be a matter of life or death.
Successfully relaying scientific information to the public can make all the difference in bringing a species back from the brink of extinction, taking preventive action in the face of climate disasters, and saving lives, yet many scientists still are not formally trained in science communication and many do not hold it to the same level of importance as their research. This has resulted in an array of scicomm endeavors that have varied widely in their approaches and impact. Some scicomm efforts have hit the mark, while others have been total flops. Some scicomm efforts have even made situations worse, leading to backlash and rejections of scientific facts. When it comes to communication with the public about science, how we approach these communications is key.
An Inconvenient Truth: Lessons to be Learned
When Al Gore hit the trail in 2006 to spread the core message of the film An Inconvenient Truth to thousands of audience members around the world, what he was doing seemed revolutionary. He had a very strong scientific message: the data is clear, climate change is real, humans are causing it, and we need to do something about it. He backed up this message with what has been deemed the “most famous slideshow in the world” a series of visuals, and in particular many complex graphs, that were projected behind him on a screen as he stood on stage after stage pleading his case.
Gore made emotional appeals to each audience members’ sense of being a part of something bigger, standing in front of an awe-inspiring image of earth, he spoke with the sincerity of a dear friend who cares deeply about you and your family. His approach successfully hooked his audience and prepared them to understand why climate change is such an urgent matter. But then he made a turn into the land of scientific graphs and jargon, thereby disengaging his audience and reducing the impact of his efforts.
SciComm Losses: Common Pitfalls and Mistakes
To Al Gore’s audiences, i.e., the general public, his data-rich graphs and jargon-filled visuals couldn’t have been further from compelling or even interesting. Audience members were faced with complicated terms and visuals they were being exposed to for the first time, Gore’s lecture went from emotion evoking to a snooze fest very quickly. According to a number of scicomm experts, Gore had committed some of the cardinal scicomm no-no’s: he overused scientific graphs, jargon, and data, the data and predictions felt too distant and unrelatable for his audience, and more importantly he hadn’t thoroughly considered his audience and how they might best receive this information.
Since 2006, opinions of the film and Gore’s efforts have varied widely. I personally do not consider An Inconvenient Truth a complete scicomm failure, but turned out to be quite a conversation starter. It did, after all, bring many important climate change terms and concepts into the public dialog. I do think though, that with such a big platform, the effort could have had a much greater impact in raising the baseline public understanding of climate change, and could have been approached in ways that may have done less to politicize the issue.
Science communicators today know that it is not enough to simply show an audience compelling data if you want them to care about an issue and motivate change. The audience must feel personally connected to the issue, it needs to be relevant to their lives. Science communicators also now know that a person’s values, social attitudes, and culture can affect their receptivity to information that may feel new or uncomfortable. So what does a successful science communication effort incorporating these concepts look like?
SciComm Wins: When Science Communication Hits the Mark
In 2019, I had the honor of attending the International Wildlife Film Festival’s Filmmakers Lab as a fellow, a cohort of science communicators went through a scicomm and filmmaking bootcamp of sorts. In a barrage of introductions, lectures, and passionate conversations, we were introduced to a variety of concepts and professionals in the field, including Ru Mahoney from Project Impact, who had been the “Impact Producer” on the 2019 film Sea of Shadows.
Sea of Shadows is a fast-paced environmental thriller that follows scientists, activists, journalists, and undercover agents as they fight to save the endangered vaquita porpoise from extinction in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, where illegal fishing operations led by drug cartels and Chinese traffickers are decimating the creature’s populations. When I watched the film, I completely forgot that it was a science-themed film and I almost forgot it was a documentary. Caught up in the action and emotion packed narrative, I left the film shaken about the future of marine life. This film implemented a variety of best science communication practices, from presenting scientific information in an exciting narrative format, to including local and culturally relevant characters, to evoking emotions in its audience.
At the time, I had no idea what an Impact Producer was, but when Mahoney came to our workshop to discuss her work on the film, I learned that in an effort to create real-world change, the crew had extended their work beyond simply making the film. In addition to the film, they created a public engagement Impact Campaign that reached communities throughout Mexico and made its way to the Mexican government and the United Nations. They championed the voices of local community leaders, they ran an education film screening tour, they sat down with decision makers, and fundraised for local and grassroots NGOs that are working to save the vaquita. Not only was their communication strategy research-informed, culturally relevant, and dynamic, they developed a holistic approach to disseminating this information to maximize impact. Their efforts led to changes in the protections for vaquitas by the Mexican government, thousands of people watched the film locally and worldwide, and a new collaborative working group was formed by key interested/affected parties in the region. Talk about some powerful scicomm!
It was once rare to see science communication approached in such holistic ways as the Sea of Shadows film did. Today, more and more science communicators are learning to incorporate storytelling, cultural relevance, social science, psychology, and even marketing techniques into their endeavors. We have learned that scicomm isn’t just about the science, it’s about the audience, it’s about the method of delivery, and importantly, it’s about meeting your audience members where they are.
Tips for SciComm Success
A few critical lessons I have learned along the way are:
- Learn about your audience and consider their values, cultures, and livelihoods. If the issue doesn’t feel relevant to them, it is going to be difficult to maintain their interest or inspire action.
- Use a variety of communication techniques like compelling visuals, narratives, and psychology informed strategies. Different people receive information differently, tailor your message and be adaptive to different contexts.
- Don’t focus as much on data and the science, as much as how this issue relates to the lives of your audience and why they should care. Data can be compelling to some audiences, but to others perceived “expertise” can actually alienate your audience and create distrust.
- Uplift the voices of local community members and interested/affected parties. Often the message is more impactful in a community when it comes from a member of that community.
- Think about how your information is being disseminated. It is often not enough to simply give a public talk or make a short YouTube video. Instead, you’ll need to consider the most effective ways to reach your target audience and meet them where they’re at.
The Mistrust of Science: Addressing the Elephant in the Room
At Unity Environmental University my days are brightened by how many of my students are passionately pursuing their degrees so they can go out and make an impact on the world. As often as I can, I try to remind my students that as they enter their careers, their technical and scientific skills will be critical, but some of the most pivotal and make-or-break moments of their careers can often come down to communication. Our successes and failures not only hinge on what we are trying to say, but how we decide to say it.
The increasing mistrust of science among Americans hit a particularly frightening boiling point during the COVID-19 pandemic. With unbridled access to information coming from a variety of sources, public audiences often do not have time or desire to determine the credibility of an article or website, to find the patterns in the data, or to decode the meaning of complex scientific figures. Scientists were once the translators, the trusted messengers who harnessed the scientific method and the peer review process to ensure that scientific information was accurate and valid. But after years of missteps in science communication, elitism, and self-inflicted alienation from the public, scientists have put themselves into a rather uncomfortable situation: people don’t have confidence in scientists anymore.
The Future of Science Communication: A Call to Action
We scientists have a big Public Relations problem, one that could determine the future of biodiversity, humanity, and the well-being of our planet. We need to pivot, and quickly, if we want to do something about it. One of our strongest tools can be science communication, but only if it is approached with empathy, strategy, and awareness. We need to be as rigorous and thoughtful about how we communicate our science as we are about conducting our research. We can rebuild public trust in the sciences by uplifting underrepresented voices, by focusing locally and making our work relevant to those it is most important to, by thinking holistically about the impact we are really trying to make, by meeting our audiences where they are, and by listening to them. Scicomm does not always need to be top-down, from “expert” to “non-expert”. We scientists have a thing or two to learn from other fields, our communities, and each and every person we meet.
I am not alone in these sentiments and have learned much from the growing multitude of science and environmental professionals who are thinking along the same lines, testing out new strategies, and fostering a new golden age of science communication. I hope you’ll join us in prioritizing scicomm and working to make your communication efforts more intentional and impactful; the future of the sciences and our planet depend on it.
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Written by Megan Oconnell, Assistant Professor of Environmental Communications & Information
