How do scientists share complex scientific ideas with the general public? Not very well, it turns out. Science communication (scicomm, as it’s called in the biz) is still a fairly new thing. “You mean scientists aren’t trained in how to talk to people about science?” you may ask. No, my dear reader, I can assure that we are not. While good scicomm is hard to come by, it is increasingly important for our society, especially due to the growing mistrust of science and scientists. Think about climate change, GMO, evolution, or the use of animals in research. In general, scientists believe in/approve of all of these items, but many non-scientists do not.
Why the rampant mistrust in science? Likely many factors, including assumptions/stereotypes about scientists themselves (e.g. cold, calculating, elitist, condescending) and a lack of understanding about the scientific process (what is a theory? Why is there all this science that seems to contradict itself?). Lucky for everyone, there are associations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that focus on increasing public appeal of scientists and decreasing knowledge gaps through scicomm. I attended the AAAS annual meeting this year for the first time, at the behest of my friend who insisted I would absolutely ADORE it. Well, she was right, and now I am here to tell you some of the things I learned that I think are important enough to share.
Four days of back-to-back seminars, workshops, and receptions surrounded by scientists, science communicators, and journalists were pretty overwhelming–in a good way, though. I furiously wrote down quotes and notes from each seminar/workshop attended, which, a month later, I finally am going over in an attempt to figure out my big takeaways. I think there are four main things I took from this experience when it comes to science communication and more general needs within the scientific (and communication, and scicomm) community:
- Storytelling is key
- Diversity is good and necessary
- Bring science to the people rather than assuming the people will come to science
- We need better scicomm mentoring and training
Storytelling Science
This is probably the thing that was emphasized the most throughout the conference: Talking about science needs to include narrative storytelling. This can be a story about the science itself, or about the scientist behind the science–both are important. Telling a story about science can do many things, importantly: it can humanize the scientists doing the science through telling their stories (especially if you include failure), and it can show people what science is really like (namely, messy and frustrating but still very important to do and listen to).
One of my favorite podcasts, Sawbones, does this really well for medical history (diseases, “cures”, people, etc.). Sydney McElroy, a doctor and co-host of the show, will go through a narrative history of that week’s topic with her husband and fellow co-host, Justin McElroy. For example, in December 2018 they did an episode on Vitamin B17
(spoilers, it is NOT an actual vitamin), taking us through the mind of the man that believed all you needed was some pancreas enzymes to cure cancer (spoilers, B17 does not cure cancer), the subsequent search to figure out if this guy’s theory was true (I’ll give you one guess on what they found), and the persistent marketing of B17 as a cancer cure even today. Listening to Sydney explain complicated topics to her husband (a full-time comedy podcaster without medical training), I always find myself both fascinated and horrified, and often satisfied at the end when Sydney assures us that things have gotten better (I say “often” because there are plenty of times when she ends with “well it’s still a thing today please don’t do this”). This podcast works for so many reasons: It humanizes doctors, it goes through the process of science through history, and the inclusion of Justin as a non-doctor/scientist shows that science can be available to anyone if it is presented in the correct way.
Diversity in Science
Diversity makes for better ideas and better science. Period. Sharing across different perspectives only leads to gains, and increases the communal intelligence of the group (or the community, or the discipline, country, etc.). Furthermore, it advances scicomm because we need to learn how to communicate across cultural borders to collaborate with each other, which strengthens our own communication skills.
However, even though we know this on an intellectual level, many groups (people of color, women, LGBTQ individuals, etc.) are still left out of the conversation. Many of these populations have become weary of science in the process of being outcast from it, which is understandable. STEM disciplines have a particularly bad reputation for having mostly white and male leadership despite a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate students. This is due to many reasons, including biased hiring practices, toxic lab/department/college environments, and societal and economic hurdles (e.g. paying for college/grad school, having a family, etc.).
The first step is realizing something needs to be done, and then communicating across cultures, sexualities, genders, races, abilities, age, etc. to figure out what needs to be done to achieve the diversity that is necessary for good science and good scicomm. This will likely include changing hiring practices to assure a diverse faculty and staff, to create a more diverse department which can then mentor a more diverse set of students. It will also likely include more inclusive teaching/mentoring/research practices that will encompass both academic areas but also community areas (e.g. learning how to teach to English as a second language learners in the community or making sure to include a spectrum of genders in research).
Science To the People
Scientists love to do science outreach in their communities (maybe not all of them, but many do!). They go to local science museums and universities to give lectures and demonstrations in an attempt to get people interested in science. We all do this–I gave a presentation just last year at a science museum on changes in the brain during addiction. This is great…for those people who choose to and are able to go to science museums and university lectures. However when we talk to these audiences, we are generally preaching to the choir. They’re already sold on science which is why they’ve come to hear us speak. But what about those audiences we REALLY want to talk to who either are a little weary of science (e.g. religious groups) or who don’t have equal access to those spaces (e.g. families without transportation to events or without childcare options).
To reach the audiences that would benefit the most from science communication, we need to take science to them rather than hoping they will meander into our lecture hall or our demonstration. This can look like working together with community church congregations to answer questions from skeptics on GMOs and evolution, can look like a pop-up science exhibit that shows up in public spaces and offers demonstrations and explanations of vaccines or autism, or can include reaching people over the internet using social media (like Scientists Who Selfie on Twitter). Showing up for people within their communities shows them that they are important to us, which is the first step to building trust with these communities to, hopefully, share scientific knowledge with them.
Scicomm Mentoring and Training
As I said in my first paragraph of this blog post, scientists have a lot of trouble communicating their science to people outside their discipline, or their topic, or sometimes even outside their office. I do think that most people are initially surprised to hear that we do not receive any communication training. And then their surprise vanishes as they remember any time they asked a scientist about their science only to receive a jargon-filled explanation that only a handful of people could possibly understand. While associations such as AAAS exist, there is still a lot of work to be done to implement training for scicomm.
To increase good scicomm practices in the scientific community, mentoring practices can be used to model good communication and give mentees opportunities to polish their own scicomm abilities. Obviously this assumes the mentor has been trained in scicomm first, which may be a lot to assume. However, if we think about the ripple effect a mentor can have on the world, training mentees to train other mentees and so on and so forth, mentor training (even for a smaller population of mentors) could have a huge effect.
Take-Home Messages
To recap: We need storytelling, diversity, to bring science to the people, and to implement better training and mentoring practices if we want our scicomm to improve.
Some of these things may seem obvious to you. In which case, good job! Keep internalizing the needs of good scicomm and go forth and teach others. For those who maybe haven’t thought about these as necessary for science, who thought that science was just about running the experiment and writing the academic paper and then running another experiment: being a scientist is also being a writer and a lecturer and a mentor and a teacher, and because of that we need to work on more than just our pipetting and stats skills.
For all you non-scientists out there: I am SO SORRY, we’re working on it, I promise!
And for good measure, here’s a photo of what my dog does when I’m away at conferences.
PhTea Time 