As I like to say, when it comes to science debates, the public is far more likely to be miserly in reaching a judgment than fully informed. Most citizens are cognitive misers relying heavily on information short cuts and heuristics to make up their minds about a science controversy, often in the absence of knowledge. The fragmented nature of our modern media system magnifies the problem of a miserly public, introducing the "problem of choice." Absent a strong preference for the really good science coverage available, citizens can completely avoid such information, paying attention instead to just entertainment media or their preferred ideological source of news.
As a result, in order to effectively engage the public, scientists and their organizations need to adapt their communication efforts to the realities of human nature and the media system. This means recasting, or "framing," their communication efforts in a way that remain consistent with the science, but that connects a complex science issue to something that the intended audience already understands or values. (For more, see this recently completed book chapter, The Scientist cover article, the essay at Science, and this journal study.)
I didn't invent these principles, I adapted them from more than sixty years of research in political communication and public opinion, applying them to science debates. In this context, when it comes to understanding what makes for effective communication strategy, there is nothing essentially unique about science from election campaigns or other political skirmishes.
The Washington Post, in an article today, spotlights this rich body of research in the social sciences, interviewing various political scientists who have been tracking levels of political knowledge in the electorate. As they note, levels of political knowledge were very low in the 1950s and they remain so today, despite increased levels of education and orders of magnitude increases in the availability of political news and information.
One of the political scientists I often cite is Samuel Popkin, author of the seminal The Reasoning Voter. He argues that in many cases it is quite rational for citizens to cut down on their information costs by relying heavily on character cues, ideology, and other heuristics in reaching judgments about politics. As a result, effective political strategists and candidates understand how to adapt their message to this reality. Here's what Popkin has to say in the WPost article:
How much credit do we give our most precious resource, the American brain? Is it half-empty or half-full? Americans "don't sound the way the high priests of culture want them to sound," says Samuel L. Popkin, author of "The Reasoning Voter," who tends to give voters more credit rather than less. "They use their own language. They process a lot more than they can recall in interviews. They have a lot better sense of who's on their side and who isn't than they're often given credit for."
Four other political scientists review this aspect of human nature and public opinion in a new book titled "The American Voter Revisited." As the WPost article recounts:
Four years ago, Lewis-Beck and Jacoby and two other political scientists decided to take on "The American Voter" once more. They used the same methods to crunch the data and even organized the book the same way. (They had to eliminate the chapter on the agrarian vote, though, because there aren't enough farmers left anymore for a usable sample.)
"The American Voter Revisited" is chock-full of depressing conclusions, couched in academic understatement. In-depth interviews conducted with 1,500 people during the two most recent presidential elections revealed that the "majority of people don't have many issues in mind" when they discuss voting, Lewis-Beck says. Sometimes they say they're attracted to a candidate because "I just don't think we should change parties right now." They tend to inherit their party allegiance from their parents, and those beliefs tend to stay fixed throughout their lives, he says.
"For many people," the authors of "Revisited" write, "dealing with political issues is too much of a bother."
"If they know they're Republican and have been happy that way, they'll stay Republican," says another of the book's four authors, Herb Weisberg, who chairs the political science department at Ohio State University. Even for those voters who do rethink their allegiance to a given party -- because, say, the party in power has fouled things up -- "if times get better, they'll get back to where they were," Weisberg says. Their attachment to party is more emotional than intellectual, Lewis-Beck suggests, akin to their feelings for sports teams.
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Research!America has public opinion poll data that shows Americans want more coverage of science and research in the media: 70% of Americans said they want more such information. Even with voter apathy, more knowledge is always a good thing.
Don't blame the public, blame the scientists.
They aren't communicating effecitively, or worse.
As an example look at the rant PZ posted yesterday about the Catholic Church...that ain't "science" and there is no use pretending it is.
Zimmer did the right think to get away from these blogs while he could...if more commenters were like him instead of PZ we would be way ahead.
Clarissa, *no one* was pretending that PZ's post was science, for goodness sake. And please don't come back and say, 'Well, it's on ScienceBlogs.' This gets dealt with again and again all over sciblogs - there is no requirement or even expectation that the bloggers here only blog about science to the exclusion of all else. Anyway, PZ's science content in terms of absolute numbers of posts is up near the top of sciblogs and only a little lower in terms of percentage of posts. In other words, if you're on PZ's RSS feed, you'll get more science in your inbox from him every week than from almost anywhere else on SciBlogs.
And where was the rant? If you could read that and see only ranting you've got yourself some strangely tinted glasses.
On topic - I would say the blame does go to the public and also to scientists' reliance on their institutions' media people. If more scientists were willing to follow the advice of the Union of Concerned Scientists and talk directly to the media themselves, cultivating relationships with local reporters, etc, I think there'd be fewer appallingly bad science articles in newspapers.
The best science communicators out there are those few great communicators who are, first and foremost, scientists.
What really interests me is that, by and large, America's big-name science communicators are also the world's science communicators, but this awful anti-science, anti-intellectual stance of the voting public seems to be more of an American problem than, say, an Australian or European problem. There is, from my point of view over here in Australia, something very wrong with the U.S. media and what it chooses to feed the public, and you guys have one hell of an uphill battle to fight.