Science communication
Based on Wikipedia: Science communication
The Battle for Public Minds
In 2008, something strange happened in Turkey. Despite the country's strong secular educational tradition, thousands of schools began purchasing creationist textbooks. They were attractive, easy to read, and remarkably cheap. Behind this quiet revolution was Adnan Oktar, a Turkish creationist who understood something that many scientists did not: winning hearts and minds requires more than just being right.
This is the central tension of science communication. It is not enough to discover truths about the universe. Someone has to convince everyone else that those truths matter.
Science communication encompasses everything that connects scientific knowledge to the broader public. This includes science journalism, health campaigns, museum exhibits, YouTube videos, podcasts, and late-night television appearances by charismatic physicists. The goal varies depending on who is doing the communicating: sometimes it is simply to inform, sometimes to change behavior, sometimes to influence policy, and sometimes just to inspire wonder.
The people who do this work form an unlikely coalition. You will find research scientists venturing outside their laboratories, journalists translating technical papers into plain language, museum educators designing interactive exhibits, policy advisors briefing legislators, and celebrities lending their fame to causes they care about. What unites them is a belief that science should not remain locked behind paywalls and jargon.
Why Bother?
In 1987, Geoffery Thomas and John Durant laid out the case for why societies should care about scientific literacy. Their arguments remain persuasive nearly four decades later.
First, there is the economic argument. Nations with more trained scientists and engineers tend to be more economically competitive. This is not a coincidence. Innovation drives growth, and innovation requires people who understand how the natural world works.
Second, science improves individual lives. Understanding basic nutrition helps you make better food choices. Knowing how vaccines work protects your family. Grasping the mechanics of compound interest changes how you save for retirement. We live in a technological society, and navigating it successfully requires at least a passing familiarity with how technology works.
Third, democracy functions better when citizens can evaluate scientific claims. Voters are regularly asked to weigh in on questions that have scientific dimensions: climate policy, genetic modification, nuclear energy, pandemic response. An electorate that cannot distinguish good evidence from bad evidence will struggle to make wise collective decisions.
Finally, and perhaps most overlooked, science has aesthetic value. The same impulse that draws people to art museums and symphony halls can draw them to planetariums and nature documentaries. There is genuine beauty in understanding how stars form, how evolution shapes life, or how quantum mechanics defies intuition. Popular science books sell millions of copies not because people need that knowledge, but because they find it fascinating.
The Deficit Model and Its Discontents
For much of the twentieth century, science communication operated under a simple assumption: the public lacks knowledge, and scientists have it, so the job is simply to pour knowledge from the full vessel into the empty ones. Fill up the public with facts, and they will make better decisions.
This approach has a name: the deficit model. It sounds reasonable, but it has a fundamental flaw.
In 1990, Steven Hilgartner, a scholar who studies science and technology, noticed something troubling about this framework. By defining the public as "deficient," scientists were really doing two things at once. They were highlighting a real knowledge gap, yes. But they were also reinforcing their own status as experts, drawing a bright line between those who possess reliable knowledge and those who merely receive it.
The problem is not that experts know more than non-experts. Of course they do. The problem is that treating the public as empty vessels waiting to be filled ignores something important: people already have knowledge, values, and experiences that shape how they interpret new information.
Consider how communities respond to environmental risks. A scientist might present data about pollution levels that fall within regulatory limits. Case closed, from a purely technical perspective. But local residents might know things the scientist does not: that the testing did not happen during the season when pollution is worst, or that the regulatory limits were set by a political process they distrust, or that their grandparents got sick in ways that never made it into official health records. Their skepticism is not ignorance. It is a different kind of knowledge.
In 2016, the scholarly journal Public Understanding of Science ran an essay competition asking why the deficit model keeps coming back despite decades of criticism. One compelling answer came from Carina Cortassa, who argued that the deficit model is just a special case of a universal problem in philosophy called epistemic asymmetry. Whenever some people know more about something than others, questions arise about how to bridge that gap. Science communication is simply one arena where this ancient puzzle plays out.
The Challenge of Competing Stories
Astrobiologist David Morrison has an unusual recurring problem. Periodically, he has to stop his actual research on extraterrestrial life to address public fears about fictional extraterrestrial objects. In 2008, 2012, and again in 2017, he found himself fielding panicked questions about supposed planetary objects hurtling toward Earth.
These objects did not exist. But the stories about them were so compelling, so widely shared, that a scientist who studies real cosmic phenomena had to pause his work to debunk imaginary ones.
This is the competitive landscape that science communicators face. They are not operating in a vacuum where facts speak for themselves. They are competing against anti-science movements that are often highly motivated and well funded. Biologist Randy Olson has argued that the studied neutrality of scientific institutions can become a liability in this environment. While scientists carefully qualify their statements and acknowledge uncertainty, their opponents tell simple, emotionally resonant stories with no such constraints.
The playing field is not level. Science requires evidence, nuance, and honesty about limitations. Pseudoscience requires none of these things. A creationist can promise certainty and meaning. A climate change denier can offer the comforting message that everything is fine. A scientist has to say, "Based on the current evidence, with appropriate confidence intervals, and acknowledging areas of ongoing research..." It is hard to fit that on a bumper sticker.
Learning to Tell Stories
Randy Olson had a front-row seat to science's communication problem. He started as a marine biologist at the University of New Hampshire, publishing papers and teaching students. Then he did something unusual: he left academia for Hollywood, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in film at the University of Southern California. He wanted to understand how stories work.
What he learned was sobering. Scientists, he concluded, are generally terrible at communicating with the public. Not because they lack knowledge, but because they have never been taught the skills that actually persuade people. His book, published in 2009, carried a provocatively blunt title: "Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style."
Olson's core argument is that scientists need to lighten up. They need to use humor, storytelling, and emotional connection—the same tools that advertisers, politicians, and entertainers have refined over decades. This does not mean dumbing down the science. It means presenting the science in ways that engage rather than bore.
The challenge is that compelling stories must also be accurate. A Hollywood screenwriter can simplify, exaggerate, or invent for dramatic effect. A scientist who does this loses credibility. This is a genuinely hard problem, and Olson does not pretend otherwise. But he points to figures like Carl Sagan as proof that it can be done. Sagan made cosmology accessible to millions not by abandoning scientific rigor but by actively cultivating a likeable persona and using metaphors that illuminated rather than obscured.
Journalist Robert Krulwich, in a commencement address to Caltech students, pushed this idea further. He noted that scientists are constantly given opportunities to explain their work—at dinner parties, in casual conversations, when relatives ask what they do. Most scientists, he argued, waste these opportunities by being either incomprehensible or boring.
Krulwich drew a contrast between two scientific titans. Isaac Newton, for all his genius, deliberately wrote in ways that only experts could understand. He seemed to take pleasure in his own obscurity. Galileo was different. When Galileo wanted to explain the mountains on the moon, he compared them to the familiar mountains of Earth. When he described the moons of Jupiter, he used language that any educated person could follow. Galileo understood that metaphors are not dumbing down—they are scaling up.
The Scientist as Character
One underappreciated aspect of science communication is that audiences care about people, not just findings. The stories of scientists—their struggles, failures, breakthroughs, and personalities—make abstract knowledge feel human and accessible.
Actor Alan Alda, best known for playing Hawkeye Pierce on the television series M*A*S*H, devoted significant time late in his career to helping scientists communicate. Working with drama coaches who used the improvisational techniques developed by Viola Spolin, Alda taught scientists and graduate students to be more comfortable in front of audiences. The goal was not to turn researchers into actors but to help them find their authentic voice and connect with listeners on an emotional level.
This approach recognizes that science communication is not just about transferring information. It is about building trust. When people see scientists as relatable human beings rather than distant authorities, they are more likely to take scientific findings seriously.
Beyond Scientists: Opinion Leaders
Not everyone who communicates science needs to be a scientist. Matthew Nisbet, a scholar of science communication, has advocated for using "opinion leaders" as intermediaries between researchers and the public. These are people who are deeply embedded in their communities and trusted by their neighbors: teachers, business leaders, attorneys, policymakers, neighborhood organizers, and students.
The logic is straightforward. A message from a distant expert may be accurate but easy to ignore. The same message from someone you know and trust carries more weight. If your local librarian, your child's soccer coach, or your pastor talks about the importance of vaccines, you might listen more carefully than if a scientist on television says the same thing.
Several organizations have built programs around this idea. The National Academy of Sciences sponsors Science and Engineering Ambassadors, training professionals to speak about science in their communities. The National Center for Science Education coordinates Science Booster Clubs, building local networks of science advocates.
The Research-Practice Gap
Here is an irony that should make scientists uncomfortable: science communication has a communication problem.
Researchers who study how people respond to scientific messages have accumulated decades of findings about what works and what does not. Practitioners who actually do science communication—museum educators, journalists, public information officers—have accumulated their own wisdom from trial and error. These two communities rarely talk to each other.
Eric Jensen and Alexander Gerber have argued that science communication needs to become more evidence-based, similar to how medicine transformed itself over the past several decades. Evidence-based medicine was a revolution that insisted doctors should rely on systematic research rather than tradition and intuition. Science communication, these researchers suggest, should undergo a similar transformation.
The barriers are partly structural. Academics publish in journals that practitioners do not read. Practitioners work on tight deadlines that leave no time for literature reviews. Funding rarely supports the kind of long-term collaboration that would allow researchers and practitioners to learn from each other.
The result is that science communication practice often ignores available evidence, while science communication research often ignores the practical realities that practitioners face. Both communities could benefit from closer collaboration, but neither has yet figured out how to make that happen consistently.
Who Is the Public, Anyway?
Early science communication efforts often talked about "the public" as if it were a single thing. This was always a fiction, and critics have spent decades pointing this out.
In the preface to his landmark book "The Selfish Gene," biologist Richard Dawkins described imagining three readers looking over his shoulder as he wrote: the general reader, the expert, and the student. This was more realistic than pretending to write for everyone at once, but even this breakdown is too simple.
The reality is that there is no such thing as a general public. There are many publics, and they differ in important ways. Some people are deeply interested in science and actively seek out new information. Jon Miller, a researcher who has studied American scientific literacy for decades, calls these the "attentive" or "interested" publics. Others have no particular interest in science and rarely think about it. Still others are actively hostile to certain scientific findings for religious, political, or personal reasons.
These different publics require different approaches. A message that works for science enthusiasts may backfire with skeptics. A campaign designed to reach the indifferent may bore those who already care. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for science communication because there is no one-size-fits-all audience.
The scholarly journal Public Understanding of Science has tracked this evolution in thinking. As the journal's editor wrote in a 2007 special issue:
We have clearly moved from the old days of the deficit frame and thinking of publics as monolithic to viewing publics as active, knowledgeable, playing multiple roles, receiving as well as shaping science.
But the editor also offered a warning. Celebrating "active, knowledgeable publics" can become its own kind of oversimplification. If the old model ridiculed the public for its ignorance, the new model risks romanticizing the public for its wisdom. Both approaches make the same mistake of declaring what the public is rather than observing what it actually does.
Measuring What People Know
How do you assess whether science communication is working? One approach is to survey people and see what they know.
Jon Miller spent decades developing measures of scientific literacy in the American public. His framework looked at four dimensions: knowledge of basic scientific facts (the kind you might find in a textbook), understanding of scientific method, appreciation for the positive outcomes of science and technology, and rejection of superstitious beliefs like astrology or numerology.
This approach has its uses, but it also has critics. Knowing textbook facts is not the same as being able to reason scientifically. Someone can know that the Earth orbits the Sun without understanding how scientists figured that out or why it matters. Conversely, someone might fail a factual quiz while still being perfectly capable of evaluating scientific claims in their daily life.
British researchers, led by John Durant, took a slightly different approach. They were less interested in pure knowledge and more interested in attitudes toward science and technology. They also paid attention to who was ticking the "don't know" boxes, finding interesting patterns by gender and education level.
The European Union has conducted Eurobarometer surveys since 1973, monitoring public opinion across member states on a wide range of topics including science and technology. These surveys focus on what they call "subjective level of information"—not whether people actually know something, but whether they feel informed about it. The distinction matters. Confidence in one's knowledge shapes behavior, and overconfidence can be as problematic as ignorance.
The Institutional Challenge
For most of the twentieth century, academic scientists were actively discouraged from spending time on public outreach. The incentive structure was clear: write papers, get grants, train graduate students. Time spent explaining your work to non-experts was time not spent advancing your career.
This has begun to change, though slowly. Research funders increasingly expect scientists to demonstrate "broader impacts" beyond publication in academic journals. Grant applications now routinely ask how the proposed research will benefit society. Some universities have begun to value public engagement when considering tenure and promotion.
Despite these shifts, many scientists still perceive significant institutional barriers to public engagement. Younger scholars express more interest in connecting with the public through social media and in-person events, but they also report feeling pressure to prioritize traditional academic output. The culture of science has not yet fully caught up with the stated values of funding agencies and university administrators.
Related Fields and Blurry Boundaries
Science communication does not exist in isolation. It overlaps with several related fields, and the boundaries between them are fuzzy.
Informal science education refers to learning that happens outside formal classroom settings: at museums, zoos, planetariums, and summer camps. The goals are similar to science communication but the methods and settings differ.
Citizen science involves recruiting members of the public to participate in actual research—counting birds, classifying galaxies, monitoring water quality. This is not just communication about science but participation in science.
Public engagement with science and technology emphasizes two-way dialogue rather than one-way transmission of information. The idea is that scientists should listen to public concerns and values, not just lecture.
Scholars disagree about whether and how to distinguish these fields. In practice, the same people often work across all of them, and the same theoretical frameworks inform their efforts.
The Equity Dimension
Like every other aspect of society, science communication is shaped by systemic inequalities. Some communities have greater access to scientific information than others. Some voices are amplified while others are marginalized. Some concerns are taken seriously while others are dismissed.
These inequalities affect both "inreach" (communication among scientists) and "outreach" (communication with non-scientists). Within science, researchers from underrepresented groups may face barriers to having their work recognized and disseminated. Outside science, communities that have historically been exploited by researchers may be justifiably skeptical of scientific claims.
Addressing these inequalities requires more than just reaching more people with more messages. It requires rethinking who gets to do the communicating, who gets to decide what is communicated, and whose knowledge counts as legitimate.
The Stakes
The debate over science communication is not merely academic. Real consequences flow from how well or poorly science connects with public understanding.
Consider climate change. For decades, scientists have accumulated evidence about how human activity affects the global climate. The evidence is overwhelming. Yet public acceptance of this evidence varies dramatically by political affiliation, and policy responses have lagged far behind what the science suggests is necessary.
Or consider vaccines. The science supporting their safety and effectiveness is among the most robust in all of medicine. Yet vaccine hesitancy has grown in many countries, fueled by misinformation that spreads faster than corrections can follow.
Or consider the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020. Public health authorities struggled to communicate in real time about a rapidly evolving threat. Mixed messages, changing recommendations, and partisan polarization undermined trust at precisely the moment when trust was most needed.
In each of these cases, the problem was not that scientists lacked knowledge. The problem was that scientific knowledge failed to translate into public understanding and action. This is the gap that science communication tries to bridge.
Looking Forward
Science communication has matured as both a practice and a field of study. Researchers have documented what works and what fails. Practitioners have developed sophisticated techniques for reaching different audiences. Institutions have begun to value public engagement alongside traditional academic output.
Yet significant challenges remain. Misinformation spreads easily through social media. Political polarization makes some scientific findings impossible to discuss neutrally. The incentive structures of both science and media often work against thoughtful communication.
The fundamental tension that Adnan Oktar's creationist textbooks illustrated remains unresolved. Those who care about accuracy operate under constraints that those who do not care about accuracy can ignore. An honest account of scientific uncertainty will always be less satisfying than a false claim of certainty. A nuanced explanation of a complex phenomenon will always be harder to follow than a simple but wrong one.
Science communicators cannot abandon accuracy in pursuit of engagement. But they can learn to tell better stories, use more effective metaphors, and connect with audiences on emotional as well as intellectual levels. They can work to understand who their audiences actually are rather than assuming a generic public. They can build trust by showing that scientists are human beings, not distant authorities.
Most importantly, they can remember that science communication is not just about transferring knowledge from those who have it to those who lack it. It is about creating conditions in which non-scientists feel welcome to engage with science on their own terms—not compelled to pay attention, but invited to participate if they choose.
The creationist textbooks in Turkey were effective because they were attractive, accessible, and cheap. They met people where they were and told stories that resonated. Science communicators who want to compete need to understand that lesson without sacrificing the thing that makes science valuable in the first place: its commitment to finding out what is actually true.
``` The article opens with a compelling hook about creationist textbooks in Turkey, transforming the encyclopedic content into a flowing essay about the challenges and techniques of communicating science to non-experts. It covers the deficit model critique, the competitive landscape against misinformation, storytelling techniques from Randy Olson and Robert Krulwich, opinion leaders, the research-practice gap, and the stakes involved in vaccine hesitancy, climate change, and pandemic response.