Photo credit: Donald Giannatti
“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
Carl Sagan wrote these words in 1995, highlighting the need for productive scientific communication in the “information age.” Even in a world with no Google, no Buzzfeed, no Facebook and no blogging, Sagan went so far as to call scientific misinformation, “a threat to our democracy and our most basic freedoms.” The famous astronomer and communicator would pass away in 1996, only one year later, without ever witnessing the massive leaps in connectivity that came with the rise of the internet.
And he was right. We have constructed a society based on science and technology, in which very few people understand science and technology. Astounding! How is a democracy supposed to benefit from science if no one in charge knows anything about it? How is a society lost in a sea of conflicting misinformation supposed to get anything done?
When scientists are able to communicate their findings effectively with the rest of the world, all levels of society benefit. In doing so, the scientist is able to encourage informed decision-making from the scale of government to the individual, to promote a broader understanding of science’s importance in society, and to build support for continued research. If they communicate effectively, scientists can access and educate communities that, to this day, are still wildly underrepresented in the scientific process. Successful communication can make the scientific community more inclusive, diverse, and ensure that science and technology broadly benefit all communities.
In Part 1 of this article, I discussed the reasons scientific communication is failing within the scientific community. But communication is two-sided, and not all of the barriers to productive scientific dialogue lie on the side of the scientists. Beyond the way science is communicated, obstacles like media and misinformation have made it incredibly challenging for non-scientists to access and use robust, scientific knowledge in their everyday lives. While there are many, I want to discuss four of the challenges non-scientists face here.
Non-scientists – Bewildered and Battered by the Back and Forth
Finding accurate, understandable scientific information is really hard.
Even for me, and I know where to look. People that spread misinformation hide behind curtains so well spun, we mistake polyester for silk. Ironically, these misinformation-spreaders are very good at understanding people; while scientists worry about the science first and human values later, someone who wants to ignite panic from their basement office chair figures out what will get people fired up and then molds (or creates from nothing) the ‘science’ until it has the desired result. Learning how to search for truth in a sea of this conflicting information is one of the largest challenges we will face in the 21st century.
““Bewildered and battered by the back and forth, the citizenry sits, for the most part, on its hands.”
”
Photo credit: United Nations CoVID-19 response
Essentially, not all “science” we read on the internet is science. Claims like “hydroxychloroquine can prevent and treat CoVID-19” should be taken with a grain of salt and the information should be validated before passing it on to a neighbor. In fact, it doesn’t hurt to treat everything we read with a grain of salt. Can that information be traced back to a scientific paper? What is the perspective of someone who works in that scientific field, who has done the work and seen the results firsthand? This goes for any number of big “scientific” claims on the internet, relating to health, the environment, food, or any other.
With the incredible amounts of information immediately available at the click of a button, we have to focus on improving how we sift through the myths and filter out the truth.
The spread of misinformation is about ego.
People will do whatever it takes to have their voices heard and have their opinions or their fears validated by those around them. Even when it ignites a panic, even when people die. Social media has transformed American culture into one where everyone feels their voice carries equal weight. This kind of individual empowerment has shaped society in positive ways, but it has also created an environment in which people are free and eager to spread dangerous lies if it gives them attention.
A recent example is Plandemic, a short video released in early May on social media that promoted falsehoods and misinformation about the CoVID-19 pandemic. The video was filled with so much blatant disinformation that social media sites began a quick and powerful campaign to remove the video from their platforms. Judy Mikovits and the producers had no intent of releasing correct or even sensible information, because they didn’t need to. They hid mountains of scientific fabrications in the emotionally gripping story of a woman being wronged by a corrupt institution. An already confused and polarized public, aggravated further by YouTube and Facebook’s attempts to remove the video from the public sphere, were quick to empathize with Mikovits, and by default, to believe her claims as fact. That a discredited researcher, resentful of the poor choices that destroyed her career, can sway the minds of thousands of people using blatant misinformation is tribute to not only the dangers of pseudoscience, but the power of empathy in impactful and effective communication.
We must be aware that people are doing this. We must be aware that well-organized conspiracy groups are prepared to capitalize on moments of fear and uncertainty through masterfully crafted misinformation narratives when authority figures fail to communicate effectively with the public. We must be aware of our own secret, infallible desires to hear our own opinions coming out of other people’s mouths. We all do it; it’s inherently human. But in a lot of cases, it drives us to make poor decisions.
The “Human Factor” limits our ability to learn or be receptive to new information.
We are constantly flooded with information that validates what we already believe. Most of the time, the people we surround ourselves with reflect our political, religious and ethical beliefs. Google and Facebook algorithms take note of the things we look at, the videos we watch, the values we cater to, and pass similar information back to us like an instant replay. This is because humans are tribal beings: we like being part of groups that share an ideology or a common set of values because it gives us a sense of purpose and security. Often, this is how we forge our identities. But in a world where the information and people around us are constantly mirroring our own beliefs, it actually becomes really uncommon for us to stumble across perspectives or ideas that challenge our own. Not to mention uncomfortable.
In the cases where we are presented with information that doesn’t fit into our preconceived or established beliefs, we often use confirmation bias to make it fit. We have a natural tendency to search for, remember, interpret, and selectively choose information that confirms our own belief systems. Take the probiotics example in my previous article. Probiotic supplements now constitute a $50 billion dollar global industry, despite being shown to have few-to-no positive health effects on already healthy human subjects. How did this industry achieve such success, despite plenty of evidence stating the contrary? How do they remain wildly successful to this day?
The information we are exposed to often reflects the values of the communities we surround ourselves with. Photo credit: Mario Purisic
A driving reason behind this is because we disproportionately build “evidence” in our minds that supports what we already believe. If someone we trust tells us that probiotics can improve gut health, and the reasoning behind this statement sounds logical (which it often does), a seed is planted that influences what information we use in the future. From there, we are more likely to search for, listen to, and interpret information that confirms our belief that probiotics improve our health, and much more likely to ignore or reject information that disagrees. This type of cognitive bias completely distorts our ability to recognize evidence and use it to make healthy decisions.
We are influenced by tribalism and confirmation biases every day, consciously or not. We see our own opinions in the world around us because we are looking for them. It’s the human factor: the elements of our own psychology that dictate how we craft our own reality. What’s important is not that we rid ourselves of these completely, but that we are aware that they influence our decisions, and we don’t let them prevent us from listening to new evidence or different perspectives. We need to challenge ourselves to question everything, to keep reading, even when the answer “satisfies” us. And importantly, we need to challenge the people in our tribes to question, and to keep reading, too.
Uncertainty doesn’t diminish scientific authority, and the media does a poor job of portraying scientific consensus.
Uncertainty exists everywhere in science. It’s what scientists were brought up on. “Oh, we don’t know if radiation causes deformities and cancer? Let’s test it on some cells and see.” Ignorance is the foundation of the scientific world, and every brick scientists lay takes them a little further from that ground state. But ignorance is uncomfortable, and if you’re not trained for years to understand it, it can be scary. Scientific findings are by definition a work in progress, but the conclusions they produce were scrutinized, tested, and retested until the community is confident enough to say the information tells us something important. If scientists don’t have all the answers, they say that. Oftentimes, the answers aren’t what people want to hear, or don’t fully answer their questions.
““The goal of science communication is not agreement, but fewer, better disagreements.” ”
Media should be a link between the scientific and non-science communities, but often does not accurately portray the widespread agreement among scientists regarding certain issues, leading them to be regarded as “controversial.” Photo credit: Flipboard
When their questions aren’t fully answered, many people “fill in the gaps” using information that makes sense in the context of their own lives. But anecdotal evidence isn’t equivalent to the experiments performed and data collected to achieve scientific confidence, and someone’s opinion on whether or not the potential CoVID-19 antiviral Remdesivir is or is not effective doesn’t carry the same weight as a published scientific study or clinical trial. Believing that it does pushes the individual to transition from using evidence to using anecdotes to make their decisions, and in cases such as CoVID-19, this transition can quite literally be the difference between life and death. Uncertainty doesn’t mean we should default to using anecdotes and emotions to inform our decisions – it means we need more data.
When it comes to uncertainty, the media only seems to make things worse, disproportionately portraying the issues at hand. Take, for example, the claim that human actions have resulted in a changing climate. A news station invites a climate change scientist supporting this claim one night, and a climate change scientist denying this claim the next night, calling this balance. But 97% of the scientific community now believes that the current changes to the climate are driven by our actions. A better representation would be a televised debate with 97 climate scientists on one side, sitting on mountainous stacks of their own papers, years of research, and evidence supporting these widely accepted claims. On the other side, 3 scientists sit on the floor, folding scraps of paper into origami factories and oil rigs that topple as quickly as their poorly supported arguments.
Science will always be a work in progress, and uncertainty is a critical part of the equation. We just don’t know yet if SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes CoVID-19, will mutate into forms less dangerous. We just don’t know yet exactly how Alzheimer’s develops in the brain, or if coral reefs ecosystems can recover from the onslaught of climate change. But there are teams of experts working day and night to figure those questions out. For now, that has to be enough.
Success Stories – And What We Can Learn from Them
Studies have shown that few people (less than sixteen percent!) outside the sciences consume scientific information regularly, even though they interact with and benefit from scientific discoveries every day. People can choose not to do science, but in a world literally built by it, they can no longer choose to ignore it.
Picture this: a society in which scientific information flows freely, conveyed by scientists in creative and accessible ways to a public that flourishes from the ability to use information to make informed decisions. A deep trust develops between the scientific institution and the public, and those that seek recognition through misinformation are quickly exposed and rightfully ignored. New discoveries are quickly integrated into policy, averting the environmental, health, and humanitarian crises that result from a lack of understanding between two distinct but now unified schools of thought. Scientists communicate to their fellow citizens with an understanding of their diverse perspectives, and their fellow citizens are eager to engage.
So how do we get there? We can learn from some of the successes in scientific communication today. Nature documentaries, like BBC’s Planet Earth and PBS’s Cosmos, have enthralled millions of viewers every year. The millions of annual visitors to Manhattan’s National History Museum. Netflix documentaries like Chasing Coral, Virunga, and Explained. National Geographic’s Pristine Seas expeditions, which aim to document and study the few pristine regions of the oceans left on earth. Pretty much any TED talk ever made.
““Science provides a sense of wonder not just from revealing the world, but also from showing that the world can be revealed.”
”
All of these efforts do a few specific things. First, they are beautiful: high production quality is a major part of communicating a sense of awe and wonder. Merging with art forms, like filmography, photography, and literature allows science to be displayed in creative, abstract, and stunning ways. Next, these efforts are honest, relevant, and relate to information or passions in our own lives. Finally, they emphasize the journey taken to arrive at certain discoveries, appealing to human emotion in the process.
We are a long way off from perfecting scientific communication, but the inertia of the above efforts carries us forward, helping us refine the tools in our arsenal along the way. Here at PassioInventa, we hope to contribute to breaking down barriers by providing a formula scientists can use to improve communication, and bring science a little closer to home. Stay tuned, stay informed, and stay safe.
-Jason
Photo credit: Thomas Vimare