The Communication Process as Evaluative Context: What Do Nonscientists Hear When Scientists Speak?

The cause and root of nearly all evils in science is this—that while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind, we neglect to seek for its true helps. Francis Bacon Aphorism IX, Novum Organum In the first paragraph of a letter in the “Science's Compass” section of Science (Bazzaz et al. 1998), a group of eminent ecologists notes that good science used to involve doing first-rate research and publishing it in the scientific literature. Now, however, they note a third necessary activity: “informing the general public (and especially taxpayers) of the relevance and importance of our work. We are convinced that this applies to even the most esoteric of ‘basic’ research, because understanding how the world works is fundamental to both satisfying natural human curiosity and solving the human predicament” (Bazzaz et al. 1998, p. 87). They conclude that ecologists of the future should be trained in teaching the public about losses of biodiversity and ecological services. Several months earlier, in her presidential address to the 1997 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Jane Lubchenco issued a call for a new social contract for science (Lubchenco 1998). It is striking how much her vision involved a new role for scientists in public discussions. Scientific knowledge, she urged, “can help frame the questions to be posed, provide assessments about current conditions, evaluate the likely consequences of different policy or management options, provide knowledge about the world, and develop new technologies…. Some of the most pressing needs include communicating the certainties and uncertainties and seriousness of different environmental or social problems, providing alternatives to address them, and educating citizens about the issues” (Lubchenco 1998, p. 495). She calls for better communication of scientific information than is already available and recommends more scientific assessments, such as those on global climate change, to inform policy and management decisions. “Scientists should be leading the dialogue on scientific priorities, new institutional arrangements, and improved mechanisms to disseminate and utilize knowledge more quickly” (Lubchenco 1998, p. 496). Clearly, communication, dialogue, dissemination of information, understanding how the world works, weighing of public priorities, evaluation, and teaching are all urgent, and all require scientists to put their expertise into the public arena for assimilation. Indeed, the eminent speak for many of the less well known as well in voicing these concerns and sounding a note of urgency. But how is this important communication and interaction to be accomplished? Apparently compelling scientific information very often runs aground almost as soon as it is launched into the choppy waters of public discourse. In statements advocating more and better communication, we often hear language that assumes that the public, with its various circles of decisionmakers, will somehow assimilate scientific information and thus be influenced in its decisions. However, if personal reports are any indication, the experience of many scientists in trying to raise public consciousness about scientific issues has been a mixture of modest success, temptations to overstate, and, in many of the most urgent cases, the sense of one step forward, two steps back. As communication scholars, we have been interested in both the successes and the missteps in the public fate of scientific information. We sympathize with scientists who wonder what happened to the “objectivity” of their work and question whether it is useful to enter the public fray armed with only their careful methods and modest claims. Is it possible, we have asked, for scientific information to make sense in similar ways for nonscientists and for scientists? We recognize that this question is naive in some respects. It is not at all clear, for one thing, that nonscientists as a group differ very much from scientists as a group in their methods of understanding various sorts of information. Moreover, what does it really mean to gauge intelligibility or understanding “as a group” or to compare such traits to those of other groups? We will leave these questions to others for the time being, but we will address the question posed above in the context of the creation and co-creation of meaning in public discourse. In answering our question, our lines of reasoning have led us to three conclusions. First, scientists and nonscientists alike would benefit by seeing science communication as a process as well as a product. The communication process inevitably bears two marks of human beings: (1) attempts at mutual influence and (2) a weighing or casting of information as either positive or negative (whether ethically good or bad, useful or not useful, or interesting or not interesting). Second, information is understood through both general and local contexts. Knowledge may be generalizable or universal in its implications, but it is framed through specific contexts that can include such things as regulatory guidelines, media coverage, individual motivation, training, education, and personal experience. For instance, recent studies appear to confirm that, on issues of risk versus benefits, nonexperts' trust of experts is often trumped by the nonexperts' personal experience. The local (direct) knowledge provides a more compelling frame of reference than others' expertise (see, e.g., Siegrist and Cvetkovich 2000). Third, objectivity is not neutrality. Once an apparently objective body of information is placed in a public context, it will inevitably be evaluated and used to evaluate other information. Not only is this a feature of sense-making, it is a feature of the communication and weighing processes of science itself. To illustrate these issues of scientific information and its conveyance, we offer three examples of science communication that involve interactions with nonscientists. The first is drawn from the study of the popular term biodiversity, which began its life with a much more limited and scientifically oriented frame of reference than it acquired in the public arena. Two other examples are drawn from our own work in arranging for scientists to speak with nonscientists about an ongoing project in basic science; the examples show how the same words, apparently common and innocuous, can come to make sense to different groups in quite different ways and how assumptions about what other people must be saying or thinking frame our understanding of the apparent issues being discussed. The following example shows the workings of social influences in redefining a scientific term. It suggests that the communication process itself influences the meaning of such a term. Before 1986, concepts such as biological diversity and conservation of ecosystems were reserved primarily for scientific discussions. From the time it was introduced into the scientific lexicon by Walter G. Rosen (Collins and Kephart 1995) and launched into the public arena during the 1986 National Forum on Biodiversity, the term biodiversity has subtly mutated for both scientists and nonscientists. Its history is documented through an analysis of over 5,000 news stories by Catherine Collins and Susan Kephart in their 1995 article “Science as News: The Emergence and Framing of Biodiversity.” The 1986 National Forum planners focused on developing educators' and policymakers' awareness of the transformation of Earth's habitat. Early concepts of biodiversity were in and focused primarily on and to the the was to the public to the of Earth's natural and the of and the 1986 Collins and Kephart the term was into the Indeed, the of the was to the public to of natural As the term was and into a of its meaning was for a more general in and biodiversity not only the of but the future a for (Collins and p. 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