Science communication

Science communication

Science communication generally refers to media aiming to talk about science with non-scientists. It is sometimes done by professional scientists (then often dubbed 'outreach' or 'popularization') but has evolved into a professional field in its own right.

Partly due to a market for professional training, science communication is also an academic discipline. The two key journals are the public understanding of science and Science Communication. Researchers in this field are often closely linked to science and technology studies, but they may also come from the history of science as well as mainstream media studies, psychology, sociology or literature studies. Agricultural communication is considered a subset of science communication from an academic and professional standpoint.

All sorts of people call the work they do ‘science communication’, and it can be a very loosely applied term. Generally, it involves some discussion of science with non-scientists. Scientists communicating to one another, for example through scholarly journal articles, are a form of science communication, but the term is usually applied to more ‘public-facing’ work.

Different approaches to science communication

Concerns over the public’s relationship with science have been around as long as we have had a concept of professional science (indeed, some would argue, earlier). Notable examples include the foundation of the royal institution and the British association for the advancement of science as well as the building of science museums across the world. Generally, these projects have been motivated by worries over the lack of public funds for science, a perceived need for more trained scientists and/or concerns that non-scientists have been misled by the claims of pseudo-science or new age beliefs.

Science communication can be a very controversial area, as the various norms and motivations of a multitude of groups bustle for dominance. For example, activist groups and scientists may all clash over science policy (e.g. on issues of similarly, journalists and scientists might argue over the best way to simplify complex ideas for a non-expert audience, or disagree over what angle a news story should take). People working in science communication often find themselves challenged to answer some quite philosophical questions on the nature of democracy, expertise and scientific realism.

Today, there are a multitude of terms associated with science communication, many with rather unfortunate acronyms. For example: PUS (the Public Understanding of Science), PEST (Public Engagement with Science & Technology), PAWS (public awareness of science) science and the media, or science in society.

Each term tends to be associated with particular ideas about the way science should or does relate to the rest of society. For example, the Public Understanding of Science (PUS) movement is generally associated with a rather didactic approach, assuming non-scientist publics are deficient in scientific knowledge which will improve their lives. A 1985 report by Walter Boomer for the Royal Society is often credited as mobilizing people in the UK around this approach. In the USA the term scientific literacy is more often used to describe a similar approach, often associated with the work of Jon Miller (e.g. 1983), whose work testing how well the public matched understand science formed the basis for the national science foundation's biannual science indicator surveys from the 1970s onwards.

In contrast to PUS and scientific literacy, science communicators who stress the word ‘engagement’ are more likely to respect non-scientist’s own knowledge (and lack of it) and feel there is worth in getting scientists and publics to talk with each other. The House of Lords Third Report on Science and Society from 2000 formalized such ‘a new mood for dialogue’ in UK science communication. Soon after, a highly influential report from the think tank Demos, See-Through Science popularized the need for ‘upstream’ engagement which emphasizes the need for the public to be involved at an early stage of science policy development.

Arguments for and against the Public Understanding of Science/ Scientific Literacy

Writing in 1987, Geoffrey Thomas and John Durant describe the various reasons for increased Public Understanding of Science as follows:

• Benefits to Science – This is the ‘to know is to love’ argument, and perhaps mixes up the word ‘understanding’ with ‘appreciation’. It suggests that increased PUS will lead to more funding, looser regulation and more trained scientists.
• Benefits to National Economics – This argues that to compete economically we need trained scientists and engineers, which more PUS will provide.
• Benefits to Individuals – This is based on the sense that we live in a technological society, and assumes that we must know some science to negotiate it (e.g. knowing about surface tension helps us kill spiders).
• Benefits to Democratic Government & Society as a Whole – This train of thought emphasizes that a scientifically informed electorate equals a more democratically run society.
• Intellectual, Aesthetic, and Moral Benefits – These arguments assume science is good for the soul in some way and increased PUS will lead to a populous of happier and more fulfilled individuals, perhaps equating science with the arts or religion.

Such arguments are quite old. As are rebuttals of them. For example, writing in 1952, Bernard Cohen points out a set of ‘fallacies’ in arguments for improved science education:

• Fallacy of Scientific Idolatry – ‘believing scientists to be lay saints, priests of truth, and superior beings who devote their lives to the selfless pursuit of higher things’.
• Fallacy of Critical Thinking – understanding science does not necessarily give you this transferable skill, as ‘may easily be demonstrated by examining carefully the lives of scientists outside of the laboratory’.
• Fallacy of Scientism – science is not the best or only way to solve problems.
• Fallacy of Miscellaneous Information – ‘the belief in the usefulness of unrelated information such as the boiling point of water, the distance in light years from the earth to various stars, the names of minerals’.

Most of the key criticisms of PUS come from 1990s work from scholars in science and technology studies. For example Steven Hilgartner (1990) argues that what he calls 'the dominant view' of science popularization tends to imply a tight boundary around those who can articulate true, reliable knowledge. By defining a deficient public as recipients of knowledge, the scientists get to contrast their own identity as experts. The process of popularization is a form of boundary work. Understood in this way, science communication may explicitly exist to connect scientists with the rest of society, but its very existence only acts to emphasize it: as if the scientific community only invited the public to play in order to reinforce its most powerful boundary (see also Buchan, 1998). Similarly, Brian wine, in his seminal study of Cambrian sheep farmers

Imagining Science’s Public(s)

Many criticisms of the PUS movement have emphasized that this thing they were calling the public was somewhat of a (unhelpful) black box. Approaches to the public changed with the move away from PUS. Science communication researchers and practitioners now often showcase their desire to listen to non-scientists as well as acknowledging an awareness of the fluid and complex nature of (post/late) modern social identities. At the very least, people will use plurals: publics or audiences. As the editor of public understanding of science but it in a special issue on publics:

We have clearly moved from the old days of the deficit frame and thinking of publics as monolithic to viewing publics as active, knowledgeable, playing multiple roles, receiving as well as shaping science. (Einsiedel, 2007: 5)

However, Einsiedel goes on to suggest both views of the public are ‘monolithic’ in their own way; they both choose to declare what something called the public is. PUS might have ridiculed publics for their ignorance, but PEST romanticizes its publics for their participatory instincts, intrinsic morality or simple collective wisdom. As Susana Horning Priest (2009) concludes in her recent introduction essay on science’s contemporary audiences, the job of science communication might be to help non-scientists feel they are not excluded as opposed to always included; that they can join in if they want, rather than that there is a necessity to spend their lives engaging.

The process of quantifiably surveying public opinion of science is now largely associated with the PUS movement (some would say unfairly). In the US, Jon Miller is the name most associated with such work and well-known for differentiating between identifiable ‘attentive’ or ‘interested’ publics (i.e. science’s fans) and those who do not care much about science and technology. Miller’s work questioned whether American publics had the follow four attributes of scientific literacy:

• Knowledge of basic textbook scientific factual knowledge.
• An understanding of scientific method.
• Appreciated the positive outcomes of science and technology
• Rejected superstitious beliefs such as astrology or numerology.

In some respects, John Durant’s work surveying British publics applied similar ideas to Miller. However, they were slightly more concerned with attitudes to science and technology, rather than just how much knowledge people had. They also looked at public confidence in their knowledge, considering issues such as the gender of those ticking don’t know boxes. We can see aspects of this approach, as well as a more ‘PEST’ influenced one, reflected within the euro barometer studies of public opinion. These have been running since 1973 to monitor public opinion in the member states, with the aim of helping the preparation of policy (and evaluation of policy). They look at a host of topics, not just science and technology but also defense, the Euro, EU enlargement and culture. Euro barometer’s recent study of Europeans’ Attitudes to Climate Change is a good example. It focuses on respondents’ ‘subjective level of information’; asking ‘personally, do you think that you are well informed or not about…? Rather than checking what people knew?