Communicating science | Sheril Kirshenbaum | TEDxCongressAve

how do we communicate science more effectively to a nation watching reality television now there's nothing wrong per se with reality television I will leave that to every individual to decide for themselves but the point is that science is shaping the way we live and we're a very distracted America right now we're a very distracted globe right now I've been thinking about this for a long time I've been thinking about communicating science for many years and my story starts in graduate school I was in a marine biology program I was studying the very charismatic sea cucumber uh and I was doing a lot of reproductive work a lot of population modeling but at the same time I took a job as a top 40 radio personality and while this seems like a tangent it's really not because I noticed early on that at the university we could have a phenomenally good scientist come and speak to everyone and 15 20 people in the audience that was pretty good but with the radio station we could pull out to three thousand four thousand people to be part of a community service event whether it was collecting food for Thanksgiving or anything like that and we made it fun and we made it engaging and we were using basic social marketing strategies that the science community wasn't really exposed to and so while the goals of pop radio are certainly different than the goals of academia it seemed clear that perhaps the science community might learn a little something from adopting similar strategies now from there I went on to work on Capitol Hill and it was a bit alarming to realize how infrequently science influenced the policy making process on really important things that are going to impact all of our lives I could be meeting with five science groups a day on a particular piece of legislation that was coming up and they didn't really have a take-home message they weren't clear they would talk to me in statistics and p-values some people even printed out PowerPoint slides and presented those to me never do that if you're ever trying to communicate and so at the same time you'd have pseudo-scientific groups coming in talking about how climate change was a big conspiracy but they were funny and they were articulate they had fancy PhDs after their names maybe not in science and they served food and so at the end of the day when those staffers needed to decide what to go back and tell their boss about it often wasn't the science that was getting through and so I decided to dedicate more of my time to connecting this gap this disconnect between science and the American public so we shall get started by looking out where things are today now just 38% of Americans correctly answered this question the universe began with a huge explosion true or false there's different ways to interpret that but 38% is a pretty low percentage about half don't believe in evolution and think the earth is less than 10,000 years old and just 18% of Americans say that they know a scientist personally I'm going to come back to that in a little while but about half of Americans can't even name a scientist and when they can you guys what do you think the top three answers might be just yell them out you guys are pretty good you're doing better than most of America um I heard Einstein I heard Hawking the top three answers are Al Gore Albert Einstein and Bill Gates now of these three guys you'll notice that they're either not alive not a scientist or not the kind of scientists that I'm talking about today and so scientists in the American mindset aren't very relatable they're usually thought of as these older white guys and lab coats not people that we know and care about who were friends with who we can really understand who are like us and therein lies a lot of the problem now this wasn't always the case in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a great cultural appreciation of science scientists in science journalists this was in the context of the space race this was at a time when we were all watching Sputnik things were different science was really celebrated today I would argue that science is as if not more relevant to the economy into policymaking than ever before but the cultural standing of science is in steep decline what do I mean by that we'll take for example if you watch five hours of cable news you're lucky if you see one minute devoted to science and technology and that minute isn't usually about the stuff that's going to really influence our lives it's about diet or fitness between 1989 and 2001 the number of newspapers that had a weekly science section shrank by 2/3 so science is losing its cultural standing and it's unclear what we can do about it but with regard to the newspapers the people who are trained to tell these stories the people who have spent their entire careers preparing us to learn about pandemics and to learn about climate because they are the translators they're losing their jobs and we're getting something else instead can the science community itself tell our stories this is just some of my very compelling data on the sea cucumber from graduate school the thing is the way that scientists are trained to communicate doesn't usually isn't usually as effective at percolating out into the mainstream we generally spend years studying one particular thing we're very meticulous we go through a very stringent peer-review process and we need to keep doing that that's very important but by the time our stuff gets published its published in these very kind of private journals that you have to have an expensive subscription even to access and so it's not really something that the general public can either interpret understand or even gain access to there is something that has changed more recently and that is the rise of an ER the internet the V sport and spectacle of the blogosphere can the bloggers save us kind of the science bloggers save us now I've been blogging since 2006 I've been on a idea of networks so I am someone who thinks that blogging does serve a purpose does provide an engaging way to interact with the public but at the same time blogging has its limits the bloggers will not save us the bloggers will not be our solution to better science communication and this is because the Internet contributes a great deal to misinformation to pseudoscience the Internet is in part responsible for the rise of the anti-vaccination movement for example you can look for any opinion you want on a science topic through Google and you'll generally find it so you can shop your science as easily as you shop for your Christmas presents online we have a great deal of kind of mobilized communities like-minded people that tend to agree with each other or really enjoy disagreeing with each other that wind up on these blogs that very few people read except within those communities and so the most popular blogs tend to just have an anti-science message or consider themselves science blogs but spend a good deal of time just bashing a religion or something like that they're not exactly solving the problem they're not creating a constructive conversation they're often in fact creating a deconstructive conversation instead but what about science on film science in Hollywood well traditionally scientists are depicted as freaks geeks or villains so you have dr. evil or you have socially awkward Rick Moranis and any number of films a skepticism is something that's celebrated it's the person who's the skeptic of science that's often the one who ends up being right in the end and scientists themselves are not generally relatable characters the good news is this is changing a little bit because this is important I said earlier that just 18% of Americans say they know a scientist personally so many of us are getting our impressions from television and film in 2009 the National Academies launched the science entertainment exchange and this is an effort based out of Los Angeles to get filmmakers and scientists talking now of course Hollywood is about entertainment it's not always about science but the argument is that you know if we work to include more science in the plot it can create even a more compelling story and we're seeing some of that films like Avatar did incorporate a lot of science into the storytelling and of course today we have the popularity of television shows like breaking bad and like the Big Bang Theory where maybe the characters aren't quite the people we know but they are a little more relatable they are a little more real and they are putting a different kind of face sometimes a different color face a different gender face on who we are and what we do giving us a chance to start telling our own stories a little bit more now I pay close attention to politics I've been working in policy and political areas since since I was working in Congress and I was paying a lot of attention leading up to the 2008 election a group I was working with science debate dot-org started following science topics just to see if science had any kind of prominence along the campaign trail this is just one example but leading up in the months to the election we looked at 171 interviews with the candidates close to 3,000 questions and so I put to you how many do you think mention climate change or global warming arguably arguably the greatest challenge to this planet how many do you think seven six you guys are so good because the answer is six and maybe that's a decent number but I want you to consider that three mentioned unidentified flying objects and it's clear that that science does not probably have a prominent place in campaign politics but it's five years later so what happened in the last round did we improve in some ways we did if you if you incorporate MSNBC MSNBC did a fair job of covering climate change this election but I can tell you if you don't count MSNBC leading up to the election of 2012 Joe Biden's smile got three times more election coverage than the topic of climate change the point is we still have quite a long way to go why do it why does any of this matter why do we need an engage public because all of these issues aren't just about the scientists themselves they are about all of us and I've just included a few images here to represent some big things coming down the pipeline many of which already here but just to give you a sense of why this is really our story it's not a science story on sick of science being treated as a special interest group science is relevant and part of how we live and who we are and if scientists themselves don't start working on ways to tell our stories other groups are going to do it for us and we're not always going to like the results I just have a picture here representing neuroscience neuroscience is starting to question concepts like free will genetics are changing fundamentally our concepts of in some ways what it means to be human we have the rise of the anti-vaccination movement places like Austin where the whooping cough is coming back because parents are opting not to vaccinate their children I have here a picture of a clownfish now raise your hand if you've heard of ocean acidification a few hands are going up what this is is all that excess carbon in the atmosphere doesn't just warm temperatures it's being absorbed into oceans oceans are actually buffering the effect of climate change but as a result the very pH of oceans is changing and this is a big deal anyone who's kept a fish tank knows that if the pH changes this can influence the animals that live there oceans are a big part of our planet and so we're already seeing changes in species like clownfish and how they behave because of small changes in pH that are already taking place but unfortunately the media doesn't seem to be covering it very much and then of course lots of questions in health policy health policy about who owns our cells what insurance companies can find out as we learn more about the human genome and climate change of course and these are just a handful of examples that are relevant to all of you oh and then there's energy sea I work in energy now and energy is inherently related to every significant challenge of the 21st century energy is about food security water depletion national security climate change it's about everything that we talk about in the news and yet most Americans don't even know what energy means energy isn't a topic we learn about in school and so it's very ambiguous and we're just not focused on it just as an example in the most recent poll asking Americans where is it most important for the government to spend your tax dollars energy ranked last under other we've got a long way to go but there is a lot that we can do and I'm going to talk at the end now just how we might be more effective at communicating science but really this is about communicating anything the first is about adapting to new media a lot of people but really a lot of people in the science community are very hesitant to get on Twitter to use Facebook it just seems awkward and weird and this isn't what we trained to do and why do we want one more responsibility with a nerdy busy schedule the thing is social media matters social media reaches far more people than ever before possible at speeds we couldn't imagine just a couple decades ago and so engaging with an audience through online media really makes a difference this is where most Americans are getting their news there's even been research published that if an article gets tweeted about it's more likely to be cited in the scientific literature later translate the scientific jargon this is so important so often we talk in as I was saying earlier in our P values in our stats in ways that aren't really relatable so figuring out ways to tell our stories that our audience understands really can make a difference which brings me to learning about your audience a talk to a bunch of kids at a museum must be different than a briefing to a chief of staff on Capitol Hill thinking about what they're comfortable hearing what they're used to choosing our cultural references carefully can make all the difference in what they take away anticipating questions and preparing preparing matters so much and we often forget it and we often don't really consider what the next question after our talk might be so thinking ahead thinking about the needs and concerns of your audience is important and then of course simplifying without dumbing down this is pretty important at the end of the day when I worked on the hill I might have a stack of briefing packets this high but all I had to bring to my boss was three points on anything what is it why does it matter how does it affect me my state my constituency I think all scientists should be able to do this with their research no matter how specific it is because after all most of us are funded by tax dollars and we're certainly not doing very well at getting tax dollars more now than ever before so we need to be able to explain what we do to anyone and finally the last point the thing I want to leave you with here today the thing that if you don't remember anything else from my talk remember this it's the most simple thing we can do and it's what we so often forget because we're so excited about our research and we've been doing it for years we want to share our methodology and we want to share our conclusions in detail and we want to tell you every step along the way that we forget to listen if more of us learn to be better listeners if we not only listen after a presentation but we offer our contact information we ask for follow-up and we allow people to approach us and bring us their questions then it becomes a two-way conversation and then we're going to be better communicators thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 33,853

Rating: 4.8767772 out of 5

Keywords: Scientific Community, ted talk, Science, The United States of America, UT Austin, ted, TEDxCongressAve, Public, Capitol Hill, Austin (City/Town/Village), Politics, Policy, English, United States Of America (Country), Sheril Kirshenbaum, TEDx, tedx talks, Science Communication (Taxonomy Subject), TEDx Congress Avenue, tedx talk, ted talks, Communication, Communicating Science, tedx, USA, Media, ted x

Id: rXqLHc5ZbbM

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2014