Science Awareness & Science Skepticism
As the two grow together, what should be your response as a public expert?
Atop the ever-expanding landfill of communications advice for scientists always stands this advice: Know and understand your audience. And like most of what’s in that advice landfill, the “know and understand your audience” bromide tends to in- form actual public engagement by scientists in ways that are at best banal and at worst fail to prepare you for the deep hostility you’re likely to encounter.
For example, Agent Majeur, a science communications agency, tells us that
The general public is interested in how your research affects their lives or society today, tomorrow, or in ten years’ time.
I wish. In fact, I’d rephrase Agent Majeur’s advice to read: “The general public is now skeptical about how your research affects their lives or society today, tomorrow, or in ten years’ time — and you have your work cut out to overcome that skepticism.”
Even more alarming: We’re seeing increasing public skepticism of science growing out of awareness (or even hyperawareness) of the science instead of ignorance or scientific illiteracy. To be an effective public expert, you have to anticipate this default skepticism and how to speak to it.
The Hostile Reception to Barbara Sahakian’s Anti-Dementia Advice
To be fair, some recent research contradicts my position here. For instance, a 2022 study in Frontiers in Communication found that a group of more than 1,000 Swiss people’s attitudes toward science as a whole — not their previous individual experi- ences with science or assessments of individual scientists’ trustworthiness — deter- mined whether they trusted science or not. The researchers admit their findings might only be germane to the Swiss. And it’s hard to square their findings with the generalized science skepticism that now emerges in reaction to even the most innocuous examples of science-based advice.
Here’s one recent example of that generalized skepticism: The reaction to this in- terview in The Telegraph headlined “What a brain expert does daily to ward off de- mentia,” featuring Barbara Sahakian, professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge. It might be behind a paywall for you — so here’s what you’d learn from it:
Sahakian has cut back on her coffee intake and has muesli cereal for breakfast, based on findings from a study she and colleagues published in the journal Cerebral Cortex last year that “showed coffee was associated with reduced grey matter in the cerebral cortex” but a cereal breakfast reduced subjects’ risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
Sahakian thinks learning anything new is a great way to keep your brain functioning at its best.
She eats tuna fish, fruit, or yogurt for lunch for the variety of neuropro- tective and neurotherapeutic benefits science has shown those foods can provide.
She walks briskly for an hour a day — because science has shown that any exercise you do habitually can increase the creation of new brain cells, “in- cluding in the hippocampus, which is an important area involved in learning and memory.”
For dinner, Sahakian often has dark green vegetables, “which are impor- tant for brain health, due to the protective effects of vitamin K and other nutrients.”
She socializes with family and friends when she can because of a study she and colleagues published in the journal Neurology last year that found “socially isolated individuals had a higher risk of developing dementia.”
She gets seven hours of sleep a night as per the findings of a study she and colleagues published in the journal Nature Aging last year that found that amount “is ideal in middle and old age, for cognition and mental health.”
I assume your world has not been rocked by any of the above (except maybe for the coffee and cereal findings). Still, the interview is textbook science-communication best practice — it puts the advice directly in Sahakian’s clear, jargonless voice and frames the science as a benign force that guides her days. Any professional communicator would tell you: The portrait painted of Sahakian is how you want to normalize science. “Following the science” here seems highly doable — almost pedestrian — and not at all contentious.
Until you look at the article comments. Here’s a small but representative sample:
Both my parents had/have dementia. They had an active social life, regularly went to the theatre, opera and concerts, read the daily paper and watched documentaries on TV, ate a relatively healthy diet and went for daily walks or bike rides, all well into their seventies, when dementia first struck my mother. My father’s culinary treat used to be a smoked mackerel once a week- for decades. I believe they ticked most of the ‘healthy lifestyle’ boxes. Although I do read with interest about research into dementia and ways to prevent it, I believe the answers still haven’t been found.
A remarkable amount of this 'brain expert's' work seems to be studies which find "associations" and then make them out to be causal.
Dementia and Alzheimer are strongly linked to genetics. This idea that by living a "good life" you will escape is just a replacement activity for the lost one of religion, which promised you heaven if you lead a "good life".
Precious little joy in her recipe, from drab food, to pure intellectual pursuits, to exercise. Meeting friends in Restaurants, theatres and Museums is of course within everybody's reach! Sound pretty impersonal to me!
Reads like a model blue sky day. Other articles say don’t go for zero fat yoghurt, avoid muesli as it has lots of sugar and don’t have cereals for breakfast. Confused.com
My mother has advanced dementia. Kept fit, had an active social life, ate healthily, no coffee, herbal trceas. Basically the whole kit and caboodle yet here we are.
Im of the opinion it's just luck of the draw. Sacrifice a good life for a dull boring life of being a health and fitness bore and it makes no difference. Think I will just carry on as I do and enjoy life while it lasts.
These are just comments, of course — not a study, not even a survey. But they’re not your usual comments, full of misogyny and raving lunacy. They reveal knowledge and sometimes even sophistication about what science has said in the past about demen- tia risk factors, about the general confusion contradictory headlines about new studies has created (especially around nutrition and diet) and about the difficulty of hewing to scientific advice that seems implementable to the advice-giver.
This is a science-aware audience — and that awareness has made them a science- skeptical audience. Yes, diet and nutrition and aging science is sometimes (often? I’m skeptical, too) junk science. But within the last month or so we have a meta-study saying masking was useless at a population level against COVID and The Economist out with a cover story reporting that “a worrying amount of medical science is fraudulent” and the US Department of Energy relighting the lab leak controversy. You might dismiss these events as hype and or distorted, but you’re not your audience. For them, and for reasons often coming out of science itself, science skepticism is spreading.
Public Experts and Science Skepticism
Conventional science communications gets away with a lot in a baseline climate of goodwill about science — like relying on shaky or misleadingly framed studies to back sweeping conclusions and get big headlines. But in a climate of science skepticism, it’s often headline science that gets creamed and/or turns people off. So if you’re a re- searcher and public expert, what should you do?
Instead of relying on single studies, you need to evaluate literatures for us and where a new paper fits into the literature and tell us what the limits of our knowledge are on the question. You need to make compelling arguments for your solutions, not just off- fer clarity on findings or repetition of messages. You have to offer and foreground so- lutions to the problems you’re addressing while acknowledging the difficulties of and roadblocks to those solutions. And you have to listen to the skepticism and under- stand where it’s coming from — in more cases than not, an overexposure to too many single-study headlines like those Sahakian blithely cites, headline science that pur- ported to have answers but were contradicted by the next headline study or our lived experience.
Generalized science skepticism isn’t good for society, but it was almost certainly an inevitable result of the headline science excesses of what I call the science-media industrial complex. Moving the needle back in this low-trust environment will require high-trust individuals — public experts instead of science communicators — because the magnetic north of a generalized positivistic attitude toward science has lost its power.
Interesting, thanks, I'm always looking for articles like this.
As a place to start, it seems helpful to distinguish between the scientific method, and our relationship with science. Or, more generally, our relationship with knowledge.
The scientific method is a conceptual tool for developing knowledge which has proven it's usefulness more times than can be counted. So there doesn't seem much room for skepticism here. The scientific method is a tool that works as intended.
Our relationship with knowledge and thus science seems a very different matter.
I'm on my way out the door at the moment and don't know your level of interest, so if it's ok, for now I'll just post a link to an article which expands on the above. Perhaps you might indicate whether this flavor of skepticism is something you wish to discuss.
Here's the quick summary:
"This article will argue that the “more is better” relationship with knowledge which is the foundation of science and our modern civilization is simplistic, outdated and increasingly dangerous."
And the link:
https://www.tannytalk.com/p/our-relationship-with-knowledge
Have a good one!
Please correct me as needed, I'm new here. My understanding of your perspective _so far_ from your About page is...
YOUR PERSPECTIVE? The science community is correct in it's assumptions, but the public doesn't fully understand science because of ineffective communication by the science community. This lack of understanding leads to mistrust, which should be remedied by better communication from the science community.
Am I in the ball park of your perspective here? If yes....
Have you considered that, very generally speaking, growing public mistrust of science may have some validity? But perhaps the public is expressing some valid concerns in a manner that is also often inarticulate and ineffective?
Have you considered that maybe the science community is, like any other actor, not in a very good position to be fully objective about it's own assumptions and operations?