“Sceptics cannot be won over by browbeating them”- Rowan Hooper
“Young researchers are much better at communicating their science than their predecessors, but the challenge remains: stay engaging and relevant” — says Rowan Hooper, Creative Director of New Scientist Live 2017. He also suggest not to try to defeat sceptics in a polemic. We caught up with him on Day 2 of the New Scientist Live Show in London’s ExCel centre and asked about the biggest challenges in communicating research to be public.
Science progresses incrementally, and most things that researchers do in the lab for example are very small advances on something that’s probably very arcane and to the general public, quite boring. So the challenge is how do you make that interesting for people to want to read or care about. In other words, how to make it interesting and relevant to normal people’s lives, but without hyping it up and overreaching what’s actually been found in the results.
“The challenge is how do you make [science] interesting for people to want to read or care about”.
What about explaining complex ideas? When you read a scientific abstract, the important discovery may be in one line at the bottom. To the untrained eye, it would be missed, so how can scientists make sure that it reaches the public?
In general, a scientist would speak with their press office at the university. You’d say here’s my really dense, hard to read paper, but look, here’s this really interesting bit here that
“I can help explain what this really means in lay terms, so that this bit get picked out without it being misunderstood.”
I think that’s what’s happening more and more. Scientists will publish or submit their paper, and they’ll also be writing a simplified version of it to send to journalists, so that hopefully will be a guiding influence when the journalist comes to interpreting this arcane paper.
Do you think that scientists need to train themselves to communicate better, or is it about finding the right outlets?
Rowan Hooper: Absolutely, scientists have to communicate better. You know, it’s amazing how well scientists can already communicate. Just look around the show today! Over here we’ve got 130 scientists speaking on everything from the origin of life to the end of the universe.
And there are complex subjects, like quantum physics, the most complex things you can imagine, and yet they’re communicating them — these are scientists, not journalists doing it. So scientists would and have already become much better at communicating what they’re doing. It’s really important for multiple reasons that they do that and they do. So it’s great.
What happens when science communication goes wrong? How lasting is the impact?
It can be dreadful! Like the MMR [vaccination] scandal is the biggest and most often cited case of that going wrong and that lead to a massive decrease in vaccinations, which has had catastrophic effects in the country and in the world. So I mean that’s the worst case scenario, but thankfully it rarely happens that bad.
“…most times when […] something goes wrong in terms of “here’s the message that was written in the academic paper, and here’s the message that the public have taken home with them” […] the consequence isn’t too bad and can be fixed quite easily.”
That’s what can happen. It can be self-correcting but it takes time. But, you know, I think most times when there’s a misstep or something goes wrong in terms of “here’s the message that was written in the academic paper, and here’s the message that the public have taken home with them” — most times when there’s a problem or a mismatch. The consequence isn’t too bad and can be fixed quite easily.
But we have sceptics and we have people who are very, very suspicious. Do we need to win them over, or focus on others?
We do need to win them over, but the question of how to win them over is a very important one. And it turns out that a lot of research has been done on how do you win over sceptics.
“If you browbeat people or try to take the fight to them, it’s very hard to change a sceptics mind.”
And weirdly, if you sit down with, say, a climate change sceptic and say look here’s all the evidence, and I just want to go through it with you, and this is what this shows, and so on.
Show them all the evidence in a gentle, easy way, that hardens the position that humans are causing climate change against their own. If you browbeat people or try to take the fight to them, it’s very hard to change a sceptics mind. So that’s a big problem — how do we do that. I don’t know the answer, but it’s a vitally important question.
And how do we ensure that scientific discoveries or research doesn’t get manipulated for political or economic means?
We can’t ensure that. That’s what politics is. You can put pressure on it, you can vote for people who you think might not do that, but that’s not really our job. As scientists, we find things and publish results, and that’s it. We’re neutral about what that’ll then be used for — if it’s technology or medical technology. That may be misused or that may be used for good, but that’s not really, I’d say in most cases, that’s not the responsibility of the scientists. Not in all cases.
“Scientists can speak more directly to the public […] they’re must more open and transparent, […] that’s got to be a good thing.”
How do you see social media? Is it good or bad for science, as you can spread misinformation or half-baked science?
But again it’s self-correcting, and I think there’s good and ill in social media, but I’d say on the whole it’s great. It’s good for getting the message out there quickly. Scientists can speak more directly to the public, which they haven’t done before. Before, it might have been scientists in their labs, in their ivory towers, mysterious. Now they’re much more open and transparent — what they can say, what they’re doing — so I think that’s got to be a good thing.
So how does somebody become a science journalist?
Well the common way now is that you take a science communication Masters degree. So most but not all science journalists I know have an undergraduate degree in some scientific subject and then they take a Masters degree, and then they join a publication or start writing as a freelancer, and that’s probably the most common route into science journalism these days.
And what would your one piece of advice be to scientists who want to communicate their science better and reach out to the public?
Start writing — simple as that.
“Find something that no-one else is doing that you know about and a different way of writing it, and just start writing it. Even if it’s on a blog.”
And then reach out to people like me at New Scientist, and other science publications or mainstream media, and say hey, look I’ve got this great story, and you know, you’ll get rejected many times, but at least you’ll start to know people, and you’ll eventually get there if that’s want you want to do with your career.
Interview by Endre Szvetnik
