Making information meaningful

Abstract

Pick nearly any environmental issue – from species and habitat loss to overexploitation of fisheries – and you will find a deep desire among most ecologists to have the results of their work incorporated into the solutions to these problems. A long-standing approach that scientists have taken when communicating their findings beyond the research community is to “translate” the information into less technical language and to use press releases, fact sheets, reports, presentations, and other vehicles to make the findings available to the media, decision makers, industry, and the public. The hope is that this one-way dissemination of information will reach the “right” people, who will then assimilate and, ultimately, use it in their decision making. While it is certainly valuable to convey complicated scientific information to non-specialists, crisply and clearly explaining research results and placing them into proper context so that readers can evaluate their relative importance, it is no longer enough. Human society is faced with a number of complex challenges, many of which include important ecological or scientific components, and which also have wide-ranging political and social implications. At the same time, new communication tools are proliferating, and an increasingly diverse media landscape has made it easier to polarize issues and exacerbate underlying ideological biases. This limits the effectiveness of unidirectional approaches to sharing knowledge and informing policy with research results. Decades of research by social scientists have shown that people filter information through their own social lens – and perhaps more importantly, through their own social networks – and that this shapes both how an individual perceives issues and the context in which they place new information. However, many ecologists still labor under the impression that if they learn to become better at presenting their knowledge, the public will listen and respond, decision makers will take notice, and solutions won't be far behind. This sentiment persists even though we now know that it is often not a lack of scientific knowledge but rather a dearth of dialogue and engagement that leads to stalemates on environmental issues. Or that, in some cases, a conscious choice has been made to give preference to other types of information. This means that merely presenting information – no matter how well translated, cleverly messaged, or enthusiastically delivered – does not ensure that the “consumer” will interpret or use it in the way the producer intended. For example, readers of a news article or fact sheet about the latest climate-change research will perceive the content in different ways, largely according to their own ideological standpoint and what other people in their social networks think about it. So, while there is certainly value in improving scientists' ability to impart their research findings as one component of improving science communication, we should also recognize that it is about more than learning to speak in ways that attract media attention. Ecologists must move beyond the traditional, unidirectional science communication model. We need to focus on engaging with the communities being impacted by our work. Indeed, communication is as much about listening as it is about talking. Just as we have learned that there is no one-size-fits-all ecosystem management approach, so too should science communication approaches be systematically tailored, evaluated, and adaptively applied. Fortunately, there is no need to start from scratch. Many of the approaches required – for instance, dialogue, mediation, framing, focus-group testing – are not new. They are, however, largely new to ecologists, particularly on the scale that is required, and so will take some experimentation to get right. Moreover, ecologists are not alone in their concern about the Earth and its ecosystems; psychologists and other social scientists are actively trying to uncover the motivations that lie behind why people care about the environment and what encourages them to alter their behavior to – for example – consume less energy. Collaboration with sociologists, psychologists, marketing researchers, and others will be a major part of the solution. Ultimately, we need to move away from our tendency to operate on a classroom model of “educating” those around us. We must acknowledge that engaged science communication is a difficult – but absolutely necessary – enterprise that requires more than simply persisting with the traditional unidirectional flow-of-information approach. True engagement means accepting that we do not control the outcomes of the process and that it may take longer than anticipated. However, it is only on the basis of the understanding we develop with others that we will progress toward solutions in which we are all invested.