SCIENCE VS FAKE NEWS
How can we deal in facts when everyone has an opinion? STEPHEN FLEISCHFRESSER ponders that and other questions.
How can we deal in facts when everyone has an opinion?
IT’S AN AGE OF DIVISION, fake news and denialism. Epistemic standards that have stood since the Enlightenment are under siege from alternative facts, the echo chambers of partisan and social media and industry lobbyists and think tanks seeking to muddy the waters about inconvenient truths.
Yet at the same time, science media, dedicated to evidence and fact-based reporting, is seemingly experiencing something of a golden age. There are star scientist communicators and an increasing number of science-specific outlets across all platforms and media. It has never been easier or more entertaining to access quality information about the natural world and our ongoing quest to unveil it.
But despite this, there seems to be a rise in visibility of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers and, of course, climate change sceptics. Science, too, seems to be falling to a creeping rot of doubt and false equivalency.
The very existence of debates about anthropogenic climate change and the safety and efficacy of vaccines stands as proof that something is off in the relationship between science, science media and the public. The extent of the problem is hard to gauge and varies from issue to issue, but the case study of climate change helps us to see the outlines.
“There is overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and that we’re driving it. Still… just 48% of United States adults believe the scientific consensus,” writes Liza Gross, senior editor for PLOS Biology in the journal’s recent special collection entitled Confronting Climate Change in the Age of Denial.
Yet Macquarie University biology professor Lesley Hughes, a member of Australia’s Climate Council, says that “hard-core denialists” number about 6-8%, though admittedly, she adds, “there is a larger proportion that still think it’s mostly natural variability”.
Who are the deniers and how many? “There are very few of them,” says veteran science broadcaster Robyn Williams in a Fourth Estate podcast on the topic, “and they’re of a particular type of a right wing of politics, an alternative right, alt right. But they have this immense loudspeaker, noise system that is drowning out so many that it gives the appearance of lots in number.”
Nonetheless, according the Australia Institute’s Climate of the Nation 2018 report, while 76% of the population acknowledge the reality of climate change, only 56% believe it is anthropogenic, while 11% deny its existence altogether. And the situation is similar in the US, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication: 70% believe and 57% agree it’s anthropogenic.
Worryingly, these figures are starkly at odds with the scientific consensus, which, according to the landmark 2013 research led by John Cook, sees 97% of publishing climate scientists agreeing that climate change is happening and is caused by our own hand.
So, what’s going wrong? Are the masses of scientists and science communicators who so busily attempt to engage and inform the lay public – online, in print and onscreen – failing to adequately explain the science? The issue might be a little more complicated than that.
The first step is to understand the public. And the experts agree that there are “publics” rather than a single monolithic social entity.
Craig Cormick, president of Australian Science Communicators, has been researching these issues for
a book coming out later this year. He suggests “there is a group of science fan boys and fan girls, who really love science, and they have never had it so good”. The fans are the major consumers of science media: they’re engaged, scientifically literate and really f#@king love science as the famous Facebook page would have it.
But the fans are few: most of the population are far more disengaged. They may be interested in other things, too busy to care, or even distrust science or have beliefs that are not based on science. This means the audience for science media is self-selecting fans. “Too much science communication is reaching out to the fan boys and fan girls,” says Cormick, “and is failing to reach the unengaged and disengaged, who need other framing and other stories to best reach them.”
When it comes to climate change, the public fractures into even smaller segments. Edward Maibach, director of the Centre for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University in the US, and his colleagues have argued that there are “six Americas” when it comes to climate change. These range from those who are most engaged to least, and from those who most align with the scientific consensus to those who actively dismiss it.
These same audience segments have also been found in Australia and other parts of the world. At the top of the range are the Alarmed and the Concerned: egalitarian left-leaning people engaged with climate change and aligned with the underlying science.
The Cautious and the Disengaged have little interest in the issue, with the latter tending to disagree with the scientific consensus more than the former. Fewer are university educated and the Disengaged tend to have lower socio-economic status. Together these are the least engaged of the six Americas. Or Australias.
Finally, there are the Doubtful and the Dismissive. These strongly individualist conservative folk tend to be actively working against the consensus and are almost as engaged with the issues as the Alarmed and Concerned. Each of these segments of society has different characteristics and Maibach and his colleagues argue that science media needs to tailor the message for each group.
These distinct “publics” have different beliefs and values – what we might call worldviews – and they are enormously important for the way people think about science.
Sander van der Linden is director of the Cambridge Social Decision-making Lab in the UK and research affiliate of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in the US. His research suggests that it’s not always about the science: “the social implications of the science often motivate science denial more than the basic science itself”.
Scientific claims can be “threatening to either their sense of self (identity), way of living or values”, and this drives their reaction to the science. Importantly, the social implications of the solutions to scientifically
identified problems play a huge role in whether people accept or reject science. If a solution, which in the case of climate change is intrinsically linked to politics, doesn’t align with their worldview, then they are more likely to reject the underlying science.
Cormick agrees. “People tend to form an opinion based on their own values, and then seek out information to confirm that attitude,” he says. “This explains how somebody whose values are about economic development can say ‘trust the science on GM foods, but the science of climate change can’t be trusted’.” What can we conclude from this? There are many different audiences for science media and they all digest science through the lens of their own worldview. If the science, or the solutions to problems revealed by science, conflict with values or beliefs that mark out important aspects of their personal
They may be interested in other things, too busy to care, or even distrust science or have beliefs that are not based on science. This means the audience for science media is self- selecting fans.
and social identity, then this creates a cognitive dissonance – a psychological discomfort at holding contradictory mental content.
There are multiple ways to get around this discomfort, depending on the audience. Reactions run from a lack of urgency over an issue too remote and impersonal to worry unduly over, to doubting the science, complete disengagement or outright denial. There is a hypothesis that the more educated climate deniers use “motivated reasoning” to avoid cognitive dissonance.
This means they seek out arguments and facts to justify a position that is predetermined by their emotions. But because of their education levels, they are better at it than most, which helps to explain their spirited counter-arguments. Yet van der Linden tells Cosmos “any pre-existing motivation to deny science does not mean that people are immune to facts”. Motivated reasoners are thus probably “a small hyper-motivated minority”.
In the absence of such conflicts, however, acceptance of the science is more likely. This explains the piecemeal attitude of many people toward science – happy to accept a socially neutral Higgs boson, but all over Facebook denouncing the global cabal of immunologists the moment someone suggests they vaccinate their kids.
Given this situation, science communicators need to frame the science and its social consequences (such as political solutions to problems like climate change) in such a way as to align with the worldviews of the different segments of the public. The same story, then, needs framing in multiple ways to align with a wider range of worldviews. “This is why I spend my time helping America’s TV weathercasters tell stories about how global climate change is changing our weather here in Ourtown USA,” says Maibach.
His research suggests that people with little involvement with science need showing rather than telling – engaging visuals and a sense of how the issues relate to them more personally – while those who are more engaged but harbour suspicions or antipathy toward science need approaching in a less confrontational way. Van der Linden agrees: “I think combining the basic science in a way that illuminates its value to people’s daily lives is a better way to tell the story of science.”
While Maibach and colleagues argue that the engaged are quite comfortable with writing that embraces the complexity of both the science and resulting policy discussions, other sections of the population require science communicators to adopt different strategies. A key such strategy that has emerged from a wide range of research is the use of narrative.
Narrative, or storytelling, is a way of communicating information that helps people see larger phenomena through the eyes of an individual with whom they can intellectually and emotionally identify. It also helps to evaluate information.
Gross notes that in the 1970s the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga identified a region of the brain he called “the interpreter” because it tries to “fit everything into a story, even filling in missing gaps, in a deep-seated need to create order from chaos”. There is evidence to suggest that our memories store our experience in narrative form and it may be “the default mode of human thought”.
Science communications experts Michael Dahlstrom from Iowa State University and Dietram Scheufele from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, both in the US, contributed to the recent the PLOS Biology special collection with their article (Escaping) the paradox of scientific storytelling. And they see a problem. “A narrative way of thinking is a distinctly unscientific way of knowledge production because it focuses on particular instances rather than considering the full range of possibilities”.
In other words, people are geared to be sensitive to anecdote but, as one paper waggishly put it, “the plural of the word anecdote is not data”.
In important ways, this reduces scientific storytelling to the same level as the narratives from non-scientific groups; it must compete with the echo chambers of partisan and social media and a rise in individualism that threatens the very notion of expertise.
Cormick sees this as the outcome of a poorly articulated popularisation of postmodern relativism that has “primed the ground for social media and its ability to undermine the certainties that were once relied on”. The result: a growth of the idea that everyone’s opinion is equal.
“A downside of the democratisation of new media and user-generated content is that emotion can trump knowledge and experts can be found credible based both on whether you agree with what they say and the passion with which they say it...” he says. “In a battle between complex science and simple emotional appeals, you can guess which one more easily wins out with many people.”
Peter Fray, professor of journalism practice at University of Technology Sydney, agrees that social media plays “the emotional side of people, not the rational side of people”. This is partly due, he thinks, to the fact social media systems have no arbitrators equivalent to the editors of traditional media. In their stead is a system of rewards based on the metric of “likes” and “shares”, and, for some, the money that comes from endorsements.
This, however, doesn’t reward civil discourse or evidence-based debate. “So, who gives a shit if my meme is right, it’s whether someone shared it,” Fray says. “Social media is the zenith of the idea that you can choose your own facts.”
Although recent research has suggested that “fake news” circulated on social media is less prevalent than one might think, the platform encourages a false equivalency between facts and emotions, which in conjunction with narrative science storytelling seems to promote unwarranted doubt. “There have always been groups of people who doubt science, but…the internet and the age of social media has amplified their voice, influence and ability to selectively seek out and credit information that bolsters their worldviews,” says van der Linden. “Everyone now has a platform on the internet, so it has become relatively easy to spread doubt, rumours, myths and conspiracies online through social networks.”
“Hence, the paradox comes into focus,” write Dahlstrom and Scheufele. “Storytelling can meaningfully engage audiences and make scientific information relevant while simultaneously encouraging a narrative way of thinking that places scientific stories on a similar level to any other plausible story that may or may not support scientific truth.” And this is but amplified in the internet age.
While the problem is real, we can’t cede the potent art of storytelling to climate sceptics and their ilk. Is there, then, a way to escape the paradox?
Rather than trying to communicate the findings of science through narrative, we should attempt to tell stories “constructed toward the goal of engaging audiences to understand the process and credibility of scientific reasoning,” say Dahlstrom and Scheufele. Stories that tell us of the use of scientific method to generate new insights and overcome problems could “show the process of science through an individual’s experience”.
But perhaps science communicators haven’t been terribly successful in this regard up to now. For van der Linden, a key element missing in the stories of scientific method is the tale of uncertainty. Science is driven by uncertainty: it fuels curiosity and leads to the rigours of the very scientific method itself. This uncertainty is the impetus for double checking, for replicating experiments and the grillings doled out by peer reviewers.
This self-scrutiny, whose engine is uncertainty, often leads to the revision of scientific findings. “But consider this,” van der Linden says. “If one year science says that it’s healthy to drink one glass of wine a day and next year the consensus is that wine is bad for our health after all, how do you think the public will react? Instead of being praised for revising and updating beliefs in light of new evidence, people may instead take away that scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, they keep changing their recommendations, how can we trust them?”
And this points to a very real problem within science itself. The standard view of science is of a purely objective faceless collective endeavour, and scientists have promoted this image. This hyper-objective façade makes it difficult for the public to accept the review and revision of scientific findings in the light of new evidence: something is either true or not and if you don’t know which, then you have no idea. But science is an incredibly human cultural enterprise. It’s fallible and emotional, while striving to be the opposite. This is unavoidable, as science is the aggregate labour of human beings. Perhaps a greater public understanding of the deep humanity of science might cast one of its great virtues, its ability to update its beliefs, in a better light.
Or, perhaps it might serve only to amplify doubts already harboured.
If telling the stories of the scientific method is to be a convincing strategy, then science communicators need to hone their craft and deal with the spectre of uncertainty and doubt that resides at the heart of the scientific enterprise. And perhaps narrative will help to humanise science and make this uncertainty more acceptable.
But there are other, less tractable, problems afoot: one of which is active voices working to confuse the issues. Maibach tells the following story. “Yesterday, I was with a US Senator – a Democrat – who said: ‘The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t get climate change. The problem is industry opposition to climate legislation.’ What he was saying is that the fossil fuel industry has a stranglehold over our political system. Conservative politicians are terrified of losing their jobs if they oppose the fossil fuel industry. So even politicians who know better will say truly stupid things like ‘the climate has always changed’ rather than cross the fossil fuel industry. Their statements, in turn, then help to convince the voters in their party that up is down and left is right.”
Exactly how scientists and science communicators are to counter this kind of force majeure is a daunting question. Whatever the answer, its discovery begs haste.
Nonetheless, perhaps the greatest challenge facing science communicators is simply reaching those portions of the community that do not actively consume science media. Until science communicators “start reaching the people who are watching the Kardashians, they’ve got a problem,” says Fray.
A carefully framed narrative aligned with an audience’s worldview will do little if they never read it. So, how to reach them?
Traditional news media seems the obvious answer – but Fray sees problems. The first of these is that “some scientific issues fall into the realm of politics. And in
the realm of politics I think we use rightly or wrongly, I think wrongly, we use a different measuring stick of what constitutes good reporting.”
News media tends to use the political model of reporting when dealing with issues like climate change and vaccines. Different sides of the same debate are relayed, and the reader is expected to make up their own mind. But this political model promotes a false equivalency between the two sides of the debate, allowing anti-vaxxers and climate sceptics to enjoy an undeserved reverence.
The second problem is that science reporting is not accorded “the same stature as political reporting. The function of the science story fits into the ‘geewhiz-martha-look-at-that’ category of stories” often designed to promote a sense of our common humanity, rather than to genuinely inform about scientific issues. “When was the last time a science story led the news?” Fray asks “The moon landing.”
The third problem is the collapse of the traditional business model of news media, which has taken science reporting with it. While you might not be able to sell an ad against a science story, he says, you can against a whole newspaper that has a substantial audience. Without the revenue, science reporting suffers and this perhaps has contributed to science communicators being vastly outnumbered. Liam Mannix at the Sydney Morning Herald, for example, is one of the few, if not the only, full-time science writers at a major masthead in Australia.
Fray has a suggestion, however: looking to the absurdly successful content producers of social media. These are people who enjoy millions of followers and wield real influence. If we can deconstruct and analyse what makes producers like Pewdiepie or John Green’s Crash Course so compelling and redeploy those strategies in the service of science, then perhaps science media can cast a wider net.
While it’s clear that science communicators can do much to improve the relationship between science and the public by tailoring stories to different audiences, telling nuanced human narratives of the scientific method and finding innovative ways to reach out to those who would otherwise not engage with scientific issues, this doesn’t necessarily mean science communicators are failing altogether. There are other forces at work. Perhaps the issues of climate change and vaccination are particularly political and pose novel problems. Fray thinks so. “I don’t think we should judge the success of science communication just by climate change. With climate change we’re not just talking about science, but politics as well.” Industry lobbyists and their chilling effect on politics, social media, the internet and the changing business models of news media are also major factors, as is the relatively small stature of science reporting within traditional media. So, what can we – by which I mean the readers (and writers) of Cosmos – take away from all this? While many of the issues are beyond our control or will take time and concerted effort, perhaps newfound self-awareness and an awareness of the needs of others is a good place to start. But no one said such things were easy, my fellow science fans.
According to the research, we are the group least likely to understand the needs of other parts of society when it comes to science. But at least we now know this: when arguing with someone over vaccines or climate change, don’t just dismiss the sceptic or anti-vaxxer as ignorant, but rather think of the social values driving their interpretation and reception of the science. Are there shared values that we can we use to reframe the debate to be more productive?
Perhaps the very act of discussing the relationship between values and knowledge will help us all to reflect upon our own biases. Maybe from such seeds, and with time and luck, local bickering can one day become global cooperation.