Scientists Get Luntzed, Drink Beer

Some of their advice we can get behind: the idea that scientists should take communications classes is inarguable, and not just to acquire framing techniques, but also to learn about intelligibility and clarity and writing for your audience. Scientists too often use jargon to assert their expertise, look askance at lay people who dare to ask questions, and refuse to take into account the real-world impact of their work. Agreed. It's also a plus if they don't unintentionally piss all over their audience's core beliefs while making a tangentially related point.

But Mooney led off (here's his blog report) by claiming he now knows that -- while War on Science was cathartic and blue-state pleasing -- it needs to be unthought and made doubleplusgood. Even though he and Nisbet had evidence from the battles over stem cell research, evolution, global warming, and hurricanes -- illustrated again and again that Republicans are willing to throw science under the bus as often as is possible for political gain -- they also argued that scientists have to adopt language that "emphasizes shared values" and avoids "talking down" to people or "attacking" their religious beliefs.

So Nisbet knocks Richard Dawkins for not finding common ground between atheism and evangelicals, which he says only increases the sense among the churched that science = godless atheism. "Plenty" of scientists are religious, he noted, not providing numbers on how many think the earth is 6,000 years old. His example that E.O. Wilson manages to talk about environmental stewardship in a way that draws upon the notion of Christian stewardship of God's creation is more compelling. (On the other hand, Dawkins' books on evolution don't argue for or against God's existence, so far as we remember -- unless God only exists if some people wrote down His "Recipe for Creating A Peopled Planet" correctly. It's Dawkins' book on atheism that focuses more singlemindedly on there not being a supreme being, and in that pugnacious British tradition of public speech.)

The Daily quotes Nisbet as saying:

The prevailing model [Seattlest: scientists trying to convey as much data as possible so that people can see for themselves what the science indicates] doesn’t match studies of how people consume information. Individuals look for shortcuts and rely on their religious or ideological backgrounds, making up their minds in the absence of full knowledge. Frames take complex issues and focus on pertinent ideas, establishing common ground with an audience.

That's the idea in a nutshell -- people use (charitably) "heuristics" or (uncharitably) "gut feelings" to get their heads around science they haven't the first clue about. So it's up to scientists to pragmatically present discoveries and research in ways that work with these mental shortcuts, not against them. To that end, Nisbet unveils a typology of frames that scientists ought to keep in mind.

This concern with gut feelings is all very Frank Luntz-like, and it bothers us no matter who's advocating it. In fact, Mooney and Nisbet use as an example of framing the fact that people voted for the guy they'd feel "comfortable having a beer with" in the last two elections.

It's worth noting that the value of framing is itself debatable (as Steven Pinker and George Lakoff demonstrate), not least in terms of the difference between the "telling people what they want to hear" and "appealing to their higher nature" approaches. But here's the thing: there's difference between taking a behavior into account vs. using it for your purposes. Once you know that people use heuristics (gut feelings, hunches) to unconsciously process information and you format your message to evoke a desired unconscious response, you're not as interested in communication as you are in control.

And here is something we didn't hear from Mooney and Nisbet that framing godfather Lakoff emphasizes: "Progressives [Seattlest: or scientists] need to learn to communicate using frames that they really believe, frames that express what their moral views really are." Whatever you want to say about Dawkins' strategy and tactics, we think he's expressing what he really believes, what his moral views really are, and that even people who ardently oppose him have confidence that he's going to hell as a man who spoke his mind.

It's worth being critical of Mooney and Nisbet's assumption that this Science 2.0 is just a shift, an upgrade -- rather than a wholesale cultural change and one that drastically undermines the hard-fought-for credibility of scientists as people who don't have to care who's listening. Naturally that was never entirely true (sorry, Galileo) but it was more true than not when it came to public awareness of research because science and the media were like George and Elaine -- they only hung out when a charismatic Jerry was around. If managing public attention is now going to be a goal of scientific inquiry from the outset, we'll all have to learn to put our guts on notice. Because it's not just evangelicals who may want to question science's application.

In The Scientist, Nesbit discusses how to frame plant biotechnology (the anti-"Frankenfood" frame) and nanotechnology (the anti-"fear of tiny science bots run amuck" frame). And then it's less cozy. It's fun to giggle about how to frame evolution or stem cells to the mouth-breathers, sure, but what about when scientists frame genetically modified food for you? ("Mother's milk adapts to a baby's needs. Why shouldn't corn?") What about when the sources you trust to supply "just the facts" start framing the safety of nanotechnology or nuclear power? ("Just like bees can sting but we love the honey, there's nano-nuclear power: the honey that makes everyone buzz.")