College aantekeningen
Complete lectures Science Communciation 2.
- Instelling
- Wageningen University (WUR)
handy for your open book exam ;)
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Lecture 1 Science Communication 30-08-21Course intro:
Wicked problem – people have a lot of arguments about it
Interventions – solve fractions between stakeholders, coherence between components
Spotlight – public audience, so no scientific language
Exam – you can bring your notes or laptop.
Introduction
Relationship between science and society, science embedded in social context, power dynamics
between science and society
Why is the shift happening? (from deficit to dialogue)
Musk – wants to build Jurassic park and dinosaurs, the question on twitter is: is it science going too
far (52%) or evils of capitalism (stealing science to make money) (48%)?
Recreating dinosaurs, should we do it or not? To learn something from it? Is it desirable?
Debates about it
Fundamental science – why not do it? Or should we only pursue applied science?
Is it ethical?
Opening up the boundaries around science
Should we explore mars? Is it a proper spending of money? Bound to public science and
funding
Science should be recognized within public sphere
What do we commonly consider the ‘scientific process’?
Where does science happen? Mostly universities
Who does science? People in cities, scientists
What is it for? What do we try to achieve? Dinosaurs?
We need more transparency, open debate and discussions – this course: how can we facilitate those
debates and create infrastructures for it?
Shift from:
From Ivory tower to agora:
Ivory tower – not
everybody has access to
it, so it creates public
backlash (deficit)
Agora – open space to
debate in Athens, so
that’s the goal of science
communication
(dialogue)
,Frictions between scientists and public sphere, instead of getting people to understand science and
like it, we instead can create environments where science and people work together, getting citizens
engaged, instead of have people respond ‘’appropriately’’. We need to shift more to thinking about
what situations prevent people from engaging?
People who engage in science unfortunately use more deficit model than the dialogue model. There
is a lot of utility about what is valid etc. we need to be more thoughtful about what is going on in the
world (think about vaccines and public opinions about it), in different fields people use different
models. Less publicly debated subjects use more deficit model (such as physics).
Some technologies are there but are not used by the public, it is only funded for fundamental
knowledge. So it is more deficit.
Why this shift from deficit to dialogue?
1. Simply disseminating ‘facts’ is not particularly useful
2. Science doesn’t happen in a social vacuum
3. Science is increasingly considered a site where democracy is promoted and exercised.
(facilitating better engagement in decision making, support better debates, more
participatory forms of government, science plays important role within democracy)
Video clip
1. Values underlying arguments by different people
Economic: wind power is not good, power is exported, they are not important
contributors but cost a lot of money compared to other sources of energy, costs for
consumers, replacing power sources costs a lot and it didn’t pay off yet
Wind: benefits for climate change,
There will be costs benefits in the future
Big wind: 4% but it is not insignificant, balance, clean energy, cost competitive, it
grows fast, it provides flexibility
2. How do they rely on science, engage with science in different ways?
3. If you were an engineer working on wind turbines, what would be your contribution to this
debate?
4. What is the role of science communication?
Mostly focused on benefits and losses, health and environmental benefits, which information they use
depends on interest: energy or economics? Values of different stakeholders are quite different, they
arrive at different solutions to the problems in pursuing wind energy
Wicked problem:
- Why your topic can be considered a wicked problem
- No definitive formulation of a wicked problem
- Uncertain problem, no stopping rule
- Not resolving the problem can be catastrophic
- Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one-shot operation’; because there is no opportunity
to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly, Irreversible damage if the
policy is not suitable
- Wicked problems do not habe an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of
potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be
incorporated into the plan
, - There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem
- No clear idea of the source of the wicked problem
- What is included in the problem and what not?
- Solutions to wicked problems are not true or false, but good or bad
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique
- Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem
- The existence of discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous
ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution
- The planner [or policy-maker] has no right to be wrong
Lecture 2: From silos in the ivory tower to transdisciplinary and public science
Wicked problems (example fresh water degradation):
Within wicked problems you got people with different values, with contrasting evidence from
science, and often all these people are right, because they use different facts that are true,
but they rely often on scientific information
Science communication cannot longer be used to simply tell people exactly what to do in
relation to problems
Fresh water degradation = in nl in relation to farming, also around fresh water like rivers that
have multiple users, one of the problems is that you don’t know exactly where the pollution
is coming from although we often have some guesses, runoff from animals in agriculture
So no definite formulation of the problem, problem is that you cannot drink it anymore, you
cannot swim there, challenging for species, you can think of this problem in different ways.
Degradation is going on and there is nothing to stop it, we cannot produce solution outside
of these places
Solution can be good or bad, people view it differently
Every wicked problem is unique, can be part of other problem, like farming (hunger might be
related), there is pressure to produce food so fresh water is needed for irrigation or other
related problem: spread of diseases, do it related to public health, also extinction of species,
so a lot of problems related/connected to the wicked problem
People who are involved in the question of fresh water, al lot of stakeholders that are
involved with managing fresh water that people can feel pressure from them (like farmers)
There in no certainty, but there are high stakes
Wicked problems, 40 years on (head 2019)
We need a second-generation of work on wicked problems that considers what we actually
know (from policy studies and social science) about how to best address wicked problems
Mainstream the analysis of ‘wicked’ problems by drawing on, and evaluating the policy
models that have been developed in the past 40 years
New ideas needed, second-generation to assess the strategies that have been effective
Some rigorous approaches to think about the problems
Science communication – also look at types of conversations, interactions that have been
facilitated between citizens, stakeholders and scientists to look at types of communication
that are effective and that we can create infrastructures to do it, how can we do it in a better
way?
There is a need for a more scientific approach to science communication, i.e one that is less
exclusively driven by intuition, personal experience or traditional ways of doing
, communication and more by an empirical understanding of how modern societies make
sense of and participate in debates over science and emerging technologies
o Through dialogue, framing (=way to present information that is generated in
traditional scientific areas)
What is the problem with deploying facts to convince people?
Biased assimilation – people only absorb information that is in line with their existing
position, really likely to reject info that is conflicting with existing knowledge, a lot of
research on it and it happens a lot with climate change
Attitude polarization – anxiety that when people are hostile about a topic they become more
hostile when science communication comes in (because of pushing people to go in opposite
direction), the research on it is more inconclusive than on biased assimilation, some argue
that people don’t become more hostile, so it doesn’t necessarily happen
o No attitude polarization – climate change, people who are not conventional climate
change believers actually often use scientific sources, sceptics are often really
interested in science, as opposed to what is often believed, sometimes to defend
their opinion they search for climate change literature, but on the other side you
don’t know what was first: the opinion or first reading about it
o Attitude polarization – nanotechnology risk
More informed people with more confidence in scientists are not more likely to feel
responsible for global warming or more concerned about it – sometimes just the opposite
o Though causal direction here is unclear but… the implication is that even people who
may be labelled as ‘sceptics’ may be actually very interested in science
Who is giving information is important, if they receive the information from somebody they
agree with, they are more prone to believe that information
Social media – surrounding by an Eco chamber that creates polarization = mixed results if it’s
true, but we are also prone to create bubble sin our own life, no proof that this is bigger in
social media
Distrust in science? Distrust in experts
Science can create a lot of boundaries, scientific language not accessible to everyone, you
need to be a scientist, a lot of statistics, media reports results in a simplistic way
Generalized distrust in science and scientists is actually rare, but distrust in the institutions
where science is done can be high, distrust in particular scientists can be high, as well as
policymakers
Why might people distrust science institutions? What kinds of institutions do you expect
people might distrust?
o Science different from everyday observations
o Source of funding of science, funded by corporations, governments, is it unbiased?
Conflict of interest
o Contradictory opinions of scientists, people who are speaking with scientific
background might be more believed
Anti/critical vax-movement
Vaccinating children for measles
- One of the major things that people debate, more people feeling ambivalent and there are
more measles outbreaks
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