20 Jul For effective science communication, ‘just the facts’ isn’t good enough
In a new communications landscape that feasts on polarization, the science community needs to rethink how it engages society in scientific discovery, controversy and policy.
The authors of a report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS) argue that the standard communication model of disseminating the facts and assuming “the truth will prevail” is increasingly falling on deaf ears.
Instead, the science community needs to create a “collaboration model” that invites more public conversations, incorporates personal morals and values, creates a level playing field for input, and embraces uncertainty.
Report co-author Dietram Scheufele, an investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research and professor of life sciences communication at UW–Madison, says the goal of the report is to address a perilous gap between science and society on major issues of the day, such as climate change, vaccines, gene editing and artificial intelligence (AI).
“Scientists do a good job of answering the technical questions they think are relevant, about the risks and the benefits, but these are not the questions communities are asking,” Scheufele says. “Communities are asking about what the science means for their personal identities, and what it means for their fears about a future that will look very different from what we have now.”