Welcome to this Department of Communications
2019 Thomas Scheidel lecture
For those who may be unfamiliar with this particular series. The Chappelle lecture was inaugurated in
1998 and has brought many prominent communication scholars to the University of Washington to engage with our
intellectual community
The lecture series honors the contributions of Thomas Scheidel a member and chair of the former. Speech
Communication department and as records tell us dr. Scheidel was strongly committed to teaching and research
Dr. Jody Nyquist also a faculty member in speech communication to organize a conference of second level language arts
Teachers in the state of Washington and with dr. Jerry philipson, Dr
Scheidel organized a Summer Institute in communication theory
this lecture series recognizes all those efforts years ago, and I'm very happy to introduce today the
2019 Thomas Scheidel lecture, dr
Dietram Scheufele of the university of Wisconsin-madison
Where he holds the John E. Ross professor in science communication and is a u.s
Distinguished achievement professor at Wisconsin. He's also affiliated with the morgridge institute for research. I guess. I'm just reading everything that's already
Which bills itself as a quote Here's my
independent research
Independent biomedical Institute exploring uncharted scientific territory to discover tomorrow's cures
professor Scheufele's research focuses on public attitudes and policy dynamics surrounding emerging science
He's one of the leading experts on science communication political communication and science and technology policy
his work has appeared in all of our top journals and some of this work has been supported by the
National Science Foundation the US Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy
His most recent research examines the role of social media and other emerging modes of communication in democratic decision-making
our guest today is a member of
the German National Academy of Sciences and engineering and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of science the
International communication Association and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences Arts and Letters
He currently co-chairs the National Academy of Sciences engineering and medicines
Standing Committee on advanced science communication research and practice and serves on a number of its other committees so I suspect
Service is not a problem for you and your end of the year review
Dr. Scheufele his work has taken him around the academic world
after getting his degree at Wisconsin
He taught and was ten-yeared at Cornell and has had fellowships or visiting appointments of Harvard Penn
Dresden and Munich today, he joins us for the Scheidel lecture of 2019
Entitled communication and the future of science, so please join me in doc in welcoming Dr. Dietram Scheufele
Well, thank you most importantly for for having me it's always good to be to be back here I
I was certain that I had brought carefully distressed jeans. That would just be right for the occasion
Until this morning. I realized that they're all full in a full-fledged hole now. So that's the yeah my apologies for that
That was unintentional but that's all have in my suitcase. So the
what I want to tell you a little bit about is a lot of the work that
We're we've been doing and when I say we I mean a team of students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin
surrounding
what I think the future of
science and I'm construing science very broadly here is for the US and the role that communication in particular has played and sometimes hasn't
And I'll end with the idea of would and maybe should play
But before I start I want to give you a little bit of my background
because it's it's been somewhat of an
Lecture journey and and and some of the grad students and I talked about this over lunch today
I started my career a long time ago in in Germany
With both my undergrad and part of my Master's
With Elisabeth nila Norman who some of you those of you in communication will know
as the creator of the model of the spiral of silence one of our big kind of macro models of
explaining opinion formation and an establishment of social norms who also
Happened to have been the the pollster who did polling for every single conservative Chancellor in Germany
Since odd an hour and and so I came
Originally out of the area of public opinion research and polling
Eventually went to Wisconsin and ended up spending what I thought were two semesters and what since then have been
20-some years six years
In the u.s. Starting to work on on electoral politics and how we all make choices
I'll come back to this a little bit about politics very often knowing very little about
Issues and or candidates and this brought me of course then to science, which is not that different
This is actually the Wisconsin campus in the in the mid nineteenth century
And the reason I put this up there is a because this is my office building right up there
Doesn't look like this anymore at the time it was teaching cheesemakers how to make cheese
Literally in Wisconsin. It doesn't get any more Wisconsin than that now it's science communication and it's probably a deeper lesson in there somewhere
But the reason I mentioned is this because I think we forget and in this States its Washington State
But the big land grants have from the day of their creation on the height of the Civil War
Have had written into that Charter the idea that we don't just do science
But we actually translate that science and take it to applications in society
That's what the idea of land grants was in the first place
this is why a lot of the old land grants like Wisconsin like Cornell still have
communication programs that are in colleges of Agriculture and life sciences
So it's not an historical artifact in a that's just an oversight
It was actually built into the design and and so a lot of the work that I started doing at Cornell and have been doing
Since then in communication units in colleges wagon Sciences has been dealing with the idea of how do we take?
Highly complex fast-moving science, and how do we meaningfully debate it and discuss it in in societal settings
so I want to talk about four things that all go through one is
why I think this is more urgent than it has been for a long time why we may be dealing with a new type of
science and why scientists and I mean by scientists both
social and
Bench scientists or even beyond the bench sciences biological physical sciences and engineering have such a hard time talking about it
Why some of that is due to human nature and a lot of the things that we hear about how we engage in motivated reasoning
Why some of our current challenges of changing media environments and I don't mean changed
I mean changing media environments may not help and then I'll end with a few
Inward-facing lessons for what I think we as a discipline
Haven't always done as well as we could have in
Contributing to this. So let me start with why I think we are in a new era and
for science
and its new in two ways
Number one is I think we're actually getting and have been getting better at assessing most technical risks surrounding science
We have lots of discussions about plastics and micro plastics and how we never did the lifecycle assessment same thing for asbestos and everything else
When nanotechnology came along when CRISPR came along so these new technologies of either modifications at the nano scale
and at the molecular level or CRISPR these new gene-editing techniques that allow us to make more effective and
cheaper and ultimately
safer modifications to the genome
We actually have started to think from the beginning about life cycle and about the technical risks. So we've really improved in that respect
What we've gotten what we haven't gotten better at is the idea that all of these new technologies are
Partly scientific problems but to a large degree for us of society. They're really political ethical regulatory problems
so some of these issues and AI is a good example artificial intelligence or
As deep mind the the google arm calls it artificial general intelligence
Have emerged in our society with absolutely no time for public debate
most major metro police departments already engage in pre-emptive
Policing meaning they use location data from people's phones social media data social network data
This is just one example from the LAPD Palantir
Chicago does the same thing as do others to basically predict who is likely to commit a crime you haven't committed a crime
but people in your networks have and you're likely as a result based on all the data that I have on you to commit a
Crime as well as a result. You're much more likely to get pulled over by the police
And to be basically engaging with law enforcement
in some way shape or form to prevent them and we can already see where the
Constitutional problems we're that are but we can also all realize that most people in this country don't even realize that this is going on
And has been going on for a long time before most of us even understood what AI was really all about
This is a chimeric embryo that's being
Researched at the Salk Institute. So this is a pig embryo that's being injected with human stem cells certain genetic markers being turned off
So that a pig Oregon doesn't grow but instead of human organ grows
So this is using pigs ideally at some point as vehicles for
Human organs that then can be translated without being rejected by the human body
What does it mean if we put a if we grow a human brain for instance in a pig embryo?
What does it mean for a Muslim
population if an organ that's been grown in a in a pig is now being implanted and so on so the ethical legal
questions that arise from many of these questions aside from the
historical baggage that comes with chimeric
Beings and in greek mythology and elsewhere you already see where
Most of the questions are not is this going to be safe and can we scientifically do it?
Because we can the questions are should we be doing this?
Which brings me to the most obvious application that actually seems innocuous in certain ways self-driving cars go to Phoenix, Arizona
they're everywhere and more than once have they run over people and
Not because the neural networks in these cars cannot tell that these are people in fact they can tell and they still run them over
so raises a whole host of questions regulatory questions meaning
Can we sue an algorithm? Can we sue the programmer who is at fault for doing this? Is it is it?
Regulators that didn't look into this
Has it been hacked? This is research that's been done at Carnegie Mellon
This is a stop sign everybody in this room
But obviously look at this as a stop sign most self-driving cars the neural network sweep is as a 45 mile an hour sign
And it's simply because a couple stickers here here and here
so it's really easy to hack these things not by rewriting the code or
Having computer viruses but simply by putting a bunch of stickers on that on a stop sign and that of course brings up the final
Issue, and that is we're selling a product right now
And we're researching a product and we're improving a product and we're pushing
Toward widespread application a product that is designed to kill the user in a very narrow
Set of circumstances
All over the country and I'm sure this university doesn't work on this as well. How do we train these cars to make moral choices?
They drive down the street. There's an elderly couple crossing the street
There's a kindergarten class on the sidewalk
And and there's a patch of black ice more realistic in Wisconsin than it is here, but car goes out of control spins
what does the car do I kill the elderly couple do I take out the kindergarten class or do I maybe is it the
Best moral choice to kill the driver and in some circumstances, of course, that's the best moral choice
You are I'm sure better people than I am
I'm not sure I would make that moral choice
If I was the driver right steer myself into a wall to protect everybody else the car will make that decision for me
so we will tell parents at some point that that car that they're buying for their son or daughter is
Actually designed to to kill them long story short what we're having is we're having a debate around
larger
scientific issues
That were ill-prepared to have and that will be largely based on the ethical legal and regulatory
Questions that come out of the science  then they're based on the scientific
facts surrounding these issues Alan leshner, who is the the former CEO of
Triple-a s the American Association for the Advancement of science has spoken to quite powerfully
And he reminded this is now almost 15 years ago more than 15 years ago
he reminded the scientific community that it that really effective communication with the public has little to do with
Talking down and explaining the science to them because if they only understood the signs, they would make better choices
What it is about is having it what he called an honest bi-directional dialogue and science
Broadly has embraced this and have said yes
we need to have this dialogue but typically
scientists end up after the end after the first half of the statement and they don't read the second half and that is
We need to have a discussion not just about why science is exciting and why these new technologies are important
We need to have a discussion also about the perils and the pitfalls. Should we create chimeric embryos?
Do we want to have AI broadly deployed in
transportation? and so forth and so that's kind of the
kind of the
Debate that we need to have and that were that we've had a really really hard time
implementing and
This is especially in countries like the u.s
easier said than done and and the reason why I mentioned the the ideas of
Chimeric embryos and CRISPR meaning you genome genome editing techniques. It's because the u.s. Is a unique country
this is data from Pugh but other people have collected similar data on the x-axis you see an
Admittedly poor indicator of development and that is GDP per capita
But you can put other ones there. It's just for the sake of simplicity
So this is between zero and fifty thousand and then here's the percent
Of the population that self identifies as very religious
And you can see how basically is a nice curve
The more developed and again, I fully acknowledged that this is a poor indicator of that but the higher GDP per capita
the lower the percentage of the population itself and it identifies as highly religious or you have
Pakistan Senegal and other countries up here and you go to Australia
Canada Germany Britain and so on down here to countries that are literally off the charts
One is China sitting down here. And then the other one is it's the u.s
up here which again really high on levels of development but also
Fairly high in terms of the percentage of the population itself it and identifies this very religious. That's not good or bad
That's just a reality and it's a reality that touches on a lot of the issues that we're dealing with stem cell research
Matt mentioned the mortgage institute for research and tissue engineering in the introduction
Crisper and so on and so forth and this is where we as a scientific community that tends to be a lot more
non-religious or even atheist and the rest of the population
Routinely run into problems. This is Neil deGrasse Tyson who some people see as one of our better
science communicators tweeting on
Christmas Day on this day long ago a child was born who by the age of 30 would transform the world
Happy birthday, Isaac Newton funny
absolutely, but trolling Christians on Christmas may not be the best way to open hearts and minds especially on an issue where I'm trying to
Reach them right I'm trying to reach them on issues where their value system or our value systems very often
It's not us versus them. But our value system is very often are at odds with what science
enables us to do
Michael Mann one of the most prominent climate scientists in this country at Penn State
Tweeting routinely that that nobody with an R next to their name meaning no Republican is safe to have in Congress
Again, if I'm a climate scientist and I'm trying to reach conservative audiences who think that climate change is basically a Democrat
Strategy to get regulations through that they couldn't get through electoral. This is not the way to do it
and of course my all-time favorite Richard Dawkins
Who just mocks everybody who either has concerns about embryonic research or
Religion also holds a chair and science communication at Cambridge ironically
But the problem with that being scientists very often
Probably don't engage in the most fruitful
Discussions and or two-way dialogue that Alan leshner called for because they're knowingly or unknowingly
Stepping on the very values that science challenges
And as a result in the closing doors that they shouldn't
Close and if the problem is getting this is data that we collect and collected in a national survey data
We've randomly assigned people to conditions about 700 people each and we asked them
At the same time but randomly assigned about different technologies
The reason we randomly assign them is to avoid what's called what we have called spillover effects and that we've documented
Again, and again meaning I ask you about one technology and your attitudes and genetic
modifications of plants and animals for instance
Lead over or spill over into into other technologies
So we ask people separately about nuclear technology as a legacy technology. Does that conflict with moral or religious views?
Does it blur the lines between God and mankind or humankind?
And for nuclear, you see some resonance on that on a ten-point scale, but not really all that much
Nanotechnology, of course is the technology that that really started pushing bless you some boundaries meaning it
It basically allowed us to create
modificators that don't exist in nature
so for the first time we actually
Had a technology that challenged that a little bit more and then for synthetic biology and this is J
craig Venter in 2010 when he inserted synthetic DNA, so this is
DNA made in a lab written from scratch into a live bacterial cell and created what he called life in the lab
What other scientists said he jump-started life, but you can already see J. Craig Venter
Frankenstein in here in the test tube and I'll come back to that idea a little bit later when it comes to why
Frankenstein in particular and the idea of framing is such a such an effective tool for communicating but long story short
this is where and CRISPR is the
Just a logical extension of this and I'll show you some data that we published in science magazine a little while ago
this came out of a
National Academies Committee on the science ethics and governance of human genome editing
so this was a committee and it was a member of it that was chaired by both an ESCO chaired by an ethicist and a
And geneticist and and basically dealt with a lot of these issues surrounding this report
we asked in a national survey if people thought that
human genome editing allowed humans to play God or if it messed with nature and you can already see that some of the numbers that
I showed you in a previous slide. This is a separate survey
Are now at fifty five sixty six percent
So we're really beginning to see widespread resonance around these ideas. And these these issues across the board
Pushing ethical moral boundaries. The interesting thing is when you're asked the same thing for wildlife it gets even more
Extreme and not in a good or bad way
But simply the attitudes become even more pronounced because I'm now piling on top of one another value concerns and concerns
From environmentalists and other groups. So in other words, I'm really
bringing together
Opposition based on values that I may be violating for different groups
and that have a cumulative effect in terms of public opinion, so
Long story short the set up of highly fast-moving science
That is you know has huge ethical legal regulatory concerns and and and really it's beginning to push value
judgments by all of us in scientists sometimes
Trampling those
Unintentionally intentionally with their feet
the last problem to just set up that first part that I want to mention really quickly is our the trust deficits that we're
seeing this comes out of the same data that I just showed you and on crispr when we ask people how much they trust as
Information sources we ask a whole bunch of them. I'm just showing you three here
University scientists
agencies and then religious groups and
Broken down the respondents by highly religious medium and then low religiosity
If you do a split in the US population that pretty much means you're not religious at all. That's the low group
So for university scientists who again, you see some some difference here and same thing for religious scientists, but that's not the surprising part
I think we all would have intuited that the the surprising or the interesting part is if you look at the dark blue lines
They don't really differ significantly across the three groups
so in other words
We we as scientists don't necessarily have any advantage in terms of being a more trusted information source for some groups in society
Which means everything that I just outlined?
Meaning the nature of the issue the violation of value systems and the way we tend to behave when we communicate publicly
become even worse because we don't have an inherent advantage and
We're basically shooting ourselves in the foot in the in the process
so
To make it all even more complicated all of that comes at a time when I think the polarized nature of our public debates and
human nature
Human nature's role in this has become even more pronounced
and
Many of you have heard about motivated reasoning
I just want to take a little bit more of a differentiated
Stab at this because very often motivated reasoning is being described as and I'll get to this in a second
But it's something that's that people engage in who are not interested in the truth
But are interested in tribal thinking and identity protection and there's some truth to that
But I think Jamie Druckman at Northwestern has written about this recently fairly powerfully where it's basically saying very often
we engage in we end up with the wrong information based on absolutely accurate motivate or
Accuracy focused motivation and the example here. It's this is again more of a Wisconsin problem than it is a Washington problem
but vitamin D and and and you live far enough north and your
Nutritionist tells you that you should take vitamin D because this is really important and you don't just get enough from sunlight
Especially during the winter months and typically those recommendations not typically but sometimes those recommendations
Don't match up exactly with for what for example
the National Academies of science the sciences engineering and
Medicine have recommended in terms of dosage and in terms of when it's really warranted
so if I turn to this
I'm probably going to take a much lower dosage in much less frequently
Then if I go talk to my nutritionist who tells me something completely different
Both of them. I have absolutely accuracy oriented motivations. There's there's nothing sinister
tribal
or directionally motivated
What is directionally motivated is the general idea of motivated reasoning that we've known from political psychology since the 80s late 80s
And very often I've delineating this because the literature very often just throws them together and I think that's misleading
Selective exposure is not motivated reasoning and in spite of recent literature
Sometimes throwing them together selective exposure is fast injure in the 50s. It says I am seeking out information that fits my prior beliefs
I am not even reading things that I don't agree with right
Um, if I'm a liberal, I'm not watching Fox News
Which means I don't have to motivate reasoning about Fox News because it never reaches me
I put Flipboard here put any other selection mechanism if that's feedly if that's other
News curation news diets on cable and so on there
The idea of motivated reasoning though is a different one. It basically says if I'm exposed to views that
Come to me regardless of what the source may be and what selective exposure may be
Let's assume all of us in this room agree on ten facts. I line them up here ten cards with ten facts
We all know they're true
All of us will still draw slightly different conclusions from those facts
why because we will engage in
What's called confirmation or disconfirmation biases meaning we will weigh more heavily those facts that fit our prior beliefs
Subconsciously and we will weigh less heavily those facts that don't fit our prior beliefs
If you really like Trump
You will look at a statement from Trump very differently than a Democrat who might not like Trump and who will
Meet the exact same statement very very differently
The tricky part is this term biased assimilation
We end up assimilating reality into our belief system rather than the other way around, right?
Democratically you would assume I constantly adjust my belief system based on the best available new information that comes my way
But that's not what motivated reasoning says what motivated reasoning says the best available evidence that comes your way
I'm gonna engage in
In confirmation biases and I'm gonna assimilate that information into my belief system interpreted in ways that doesn't threaten my belief system
So I can protect my tribal identity
and that seems like something that we can totally be judgmental about but I'm gonna just to not do that and partly because of the
Issue of stem-cell research. This was George Bush as you may remember with snowflake babies as they were called at the time
So these are leftover embryos from IVF
that sometimes parents allowed to be used in research that sometimes get discarded and under an
Initiative by the Bush 43 administration were actually used for adoption
So parents could adopt a fertilized embryo have it implanted carry to term
The reason they were called snowflake babies because why that term was used to say, well they're unique like
snowflakes every single one of these
embryos that
Scientists want to use for stem-cell research could be a baby and every single one of us in this room understands
What the moral dilemma is. No matter what your stance is on embryonic stem cell research
You will understand what the dilemma is
You will also understand Michael J Fox who's saying we need this kind of research for Parkinson's into and to cure
debilitating diseases
The problem with motivated reasoning is that the exact same facts will mean very different things to different people
Now that may be one thing in politics and for issues like abortion
where a lot of it comes down to moral judgments and political judgments and again, I
This is probably too much of an ongoing issue right now. I just saw that the
governor just signed to you the Alabama bill, but for science
It's a real problem the fact that the same scientific facts mean different things to different people is a novel
Problem or one that at least at the scope that we're seeing it at at the scale is a novel problem
I want to show you an example from Wisconsin of course at Wisconsin
We're we're you know, it's a fairly liberal campus. Well known for that and we had a governor Scott Walker for a long time
Who took 300 million
From the UW System and gave it to the Milwaukee Bucks
Which I guess worked out there in the playoffs, right?
I think I don't do basketball
but the that's and what he did also in the process is if this took a bunch of
Matching money that the state had committed to a large Department of Energy
That we had on biofuels and the response that the university was as Swift as it was yeah not understanding
What was going on because our response was how does he not get how
Devastating this is for the state economy taking money
that's that's out of one of the biggest economic drivers meaning the
University and its research but what we had at the time we did we had a project in the field with
with the Corn Growers Association at
Wisconsin
Also a very Wisconsin thing to get your research funded by the Corn Growers Association
Well, we asked you know how much information people got about the issue of ethanol and biofuels
So this is now I'm just showing you a simplistic plot of an interaction
there's obviously lots of controls for other demographics and other confounds and then I just plotted here do people think that it has a
Positive effect on the economy that biofuels or a negative effect
So the more information people get and for Democrats the more information they got the more excited. They got about biofuels
And it didn't matter if it came from newspapers or television
And you can already see what the whitespace is here for Republicans and it goes in exactly
The opposite direction. Neither one of them is right or wrong
But they both take the exact same information
About about an emerging technology and they draw opposite conclusions. So two things that are really important here
Just putting more facts in front of people and for motivated reasoning very often just ends up
Polarizing and this is really the important part the group. That's most polarized. It's also the one that's most knowledgeable
Typically polarization doesn't occur and lots of other people Dan kahan DDL others have shown the same thing the highest level of polarization
Tend to occur for the groups that are most knowledgeable have the most integrated
Ideological frameworks because for them everything goes on a shelf that and a very well-developed shelf system
That allows them to to quickly basically motivated ly reason their way out of anything that doesn't fit their their prior beliefs
alright, so
And this is at least one person. Usually you guys should know some of you will know Mike xenos
He came out of this program
But when I said earlier, these are two of my frequent collaborators Dominique Broussard, who is who is our department chair
Train geneticist at the master's-level in a PhD in communication and magazine, o--'s who comes out of political communication?
I think Lance Bennett student when he was here a long time ago just looks really young
but
But so we are currently starting an NSF grant
That's trying to reverse what I just showed you in the previous life meaning. How can we create these broad
deliberative exchanges these broad
discussions among the public? and
depolarize them from the get-go meaning avoid that polarizing effect that as we're having more conversations and we put more information and
We don't end up with this wide polarization
So what we and this is seed data that led to this
to this NSF grant that we're just starting now or have that has been going on for a half year and
What we did here is we basically put undergraduates in four different groups. This is a similar simple experiment on a non political issue
Nanotechnology, right? It's not polarized. It's not polarizing. There's not partisan divides and so on and so forth
What we basically did is we gave people a bunch of questions on nanotechnology. So again,
modifications 1 to 100 nanometers small molecular changes and then we said well
We're gonna eventually after this experiment. We're gonna put you in a discussion group
Where you will have to discuss the issue with other people
There were four different conditions one the control they were not told that they had to be in a discussion afterwards
So they just basically went through the experiment one group said you have to talk to all let me start here
You have to talk to others, but we didn't tell them what the others would look like
You have to talk to others and they're gonna be similar in opinions to you. Meaning you're gonna talk to your tribe or
discussions with others that will have opposing viewpoints
The discussion never well, it did take place
But only so the undergrads wouldn't go off and tell their friends that they didn't have to discuss
So that was the discussion itself. Didn't matter. What we cared about is the threat of discussion
This goes back to Phil tetlock work at Penn
Micro loss work at Northwestern this basically said that if I can
Create a sense in you of social accountability
Meaning you will have to talk to other people that are not like you you will end up engaging in very different types of information
Seeking and process then if you're basically free to engage in whatever motivated reasoning and tribal thinking
You're allowed to so it's a pretty weak manipulation
If you think about it, right only telling them that they will have to discuss. It's all we're telling them
What we then do is we basically say now go off and look at a bunch of information before we ask you a few
follow-up questions before the discussion and then we create a
Gated information environment where we're saying you can either spend time on general news
So basically their articles from general who's a I don't know eight articles
the eight articles from science and medicine and the eight articles that show both sides of the issue meaning that really
Pull in both sides not just one in a motivated reasoning sense
And then we simply track what they do in that gated information environment. So gated means they can't go outside online to other websites
They have to stay in there
And this is the important part
So the first this is just a percentages of where they go first in terms of two-sided information versus everything else
Two-sided information in the all the groups that are that are threatened with discussion much higher than in the no discussion group
So simply threatening people with discussion already
Drives their two-sided or their more
two-sided information processing and seeking and then of course if you look at the ones with opposing viewpoints
That's actually where that number is highest
Is that evidence of motivate of countering motivated reasoning now, is it evidence that suggests that the mechanism works?
Absolutely
and so as I said
This is C data
And this is this is what we used as a starting point for that NSF grant
But I wanted to show you that there's lots of work
Beginning on how we actually create better democratic decision-making in spite of our human tendencies
That push us to do the exact the exact opposite
So let me get to the third point which is which is how emerging media systems
Tend to not help and I used to be able to explain this to my students much better
But now my students are of an age where they don't understand what it means to read a newspaper or to look at an article
that doesn't have likes or
Retweets or comments underneath it. That just has never existed for them
Right, but there used to be a time when I the newspaper and the hotel here still has print newspapers and I took a picture
They still look print you pay newspapers, and I'm sitting there
I'm reading the article and I have no idea what anybody else thinks about the article and I have no way of telling
That's what used to happen now
I have immediate queues for every single article tweet Facebook post anything else of how popular it is
How often it's been shared and so on and so forth
it's impossible for me to not immediately judge in a YouTube clip of
How good it must be because nobody has liked it or you know
A thousand people disliked it and only three people like that and so on and so forth
Those are social endorsements absolutely, but they're also tribal cues in terms of who likes them who among my friends like them
How did they get retweeted? How did they get commented on? so one of the things that we were interested in
And this is a project a couple years ago a few years ago
We wanted to know what happens if we put information in front of people that doesn't differ in the content
So this was Vancouver Sun. We went Canadian sources
Hopefully that would be less ideologically
colored than some of the u.s. Sources Canadian Sun neutral and then we basically
Put that in front of about three and a half thousand people in the National Sample
Where we basically kept everybody read the exact same story. This is again a story about nanotechnology and nano silver
Shouldn't be polarized at all
What we did change is we changed the comments. And so these were
Manipulated comments that had made the same arguments in favor or against using nano silver and cleaning products and so on
But one condition was very civil and the other one was very uncivil
Meaning one condition people disagreed on the facts and the other one they still disagreed about the facts
But they preface that they're saying what kind of an idiot are you this is?
Obviously wrong and here's why all the facts right so the uncivil versus civil condition
Why is this so important because there's no substantive difference in content?
The only difference is how we talk to one another what the tone is of the discussion
If the tone of discussion goes south if the discussions are uncivil
People were significantly more likely to see bias in the article itself. They read the exact same article
there was no difference but if they read
Comments that yelled at engaged in yelling and screaming afterwards
They inferred that if there's smoke and there's yelling and screaming there must be fire meaning something must be wrong with the article
And number two is the people who read the article with followed by the more uncivil
Comments also ended up being more polarized in their attitudes meaning people who had supported the technology before
Supported even more people were posted opposed it even more
So you have to let that sink in a little bit because nothing of that is a Content effect
It's all simply a perception of the tone with which we talk to one another
influencing readers who come to the article later on and look at this yelling and screaming and make a judgement from other people's comments about
How good or bad the article is and that wasn't lost on
News organized or news organizations themselves and just to illustrate the point of print
This was the very first and News values and everything else
This was one of the first articles that was written in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
about our study
really good science coverage sitting at the bottom of a page just
Before the weather with a jump just in case anybody was tempted to read it now. Nobody will read it
This was the online version aside from the fact that some a be testing led to a slightly different headline
This is my point about social endorsements, right?
I know immediately two hours in that 170 people commented on this story that a thousand people liked it on Facebook and
For some weird reason two people interested it or pinned it on their pin boards, whatever that I don't know what that is
but that
really makes the point but what made the point even more and I thought this is
Still one of my favorite are the comments on our study. So this is all these studies by pointy-headed scientists
99% this is us. This is us
As researchers 99% of whom are socialists and communists
Wisconsin professors bewildered by science opinion being questioned rather than being accepted as told
Not really
But still and this is my favorite one because anybody who comes up with findings like the ones we did must hate God in country
I was still the favorite the the funny thing about this of course is that the irony was completely lost on the commenters that
Exactly what we're doing research on
It was not lost on the onion and I don't have to see this is my the pinnacle of my academic career
was being in the onion and the onion taking a shot at
At at comment sections the onion also
I would like to point that out
wrote by far the best summary of the social science of our study of any news outlet and that includes the New York Times and
And I think the New York Times did a good job, but they onion whoever they didn't smoke that week. I'm pretty certain
because that was a good summary, but the
We wrote about this in the New York Times at some point and and and basically said look
We may have a problem for news organizations
and
because because this is the the very
essence of what explains some of the declining levels of trust right the idea that that's simply by giving
ourselves a forum to be bad citizens
We're destroying the very potentially the perception of the very product of journalism and popular science
one of the higher circulation science magazines as a result of
Of this discussion ended up closing their comment section and a very highly publicized especially in the science communication decision
which of course then kicked off another discussion where people basically said well this is against freedom of speech and these
These comments studies out of Wisconsin are basically undermining people's right to free speech which I disagree with for a variety of reasons
But it was a good discussion on the less that Pam Ballack. I think summarized really nicely
But by that time the dam had really kind of broken
and eventually the Chicago sun-times
Reuters
CNN all ended up closing their comments section simply saying it's so expensive to
To moderate comments and to avoid that nasty effect as we ended up calling it
This is actually an editor from the New York Times came up with this
but that even when reddit came up with their new at the time news that
Uploaded it, even they didn't allow comments on a reddit product let that I mean think about that read it doesn't allow comments
That's what reddit is it is comment and even they were saying look this may not be that the best
One of the things and this preview is a little bit of my conclusion
One of the things that I think we're doing really well in
Communication is identifying problems
and one of the things that we do really poorly is
Doing research on solutions for large societal problems us included meaning our research tubing team included
We talked to news agencies and newsrooms all over the country in the world for that matter
About this effect because everybody was concerned about the same thing and asked us the same question
How do we fix it?
And our response was like well, we don't really have any research on that because we haven't just done that yet
So what we did and in a subsequent study, avery replicated the effect and this is Sarah Yeo
This just came out last year and I just want to show you one because it's a it's a really cool effect
And there was just a piece in in PNAS and Proceedings of the National Academies that did something somewhat similar or consistent
And basically so this is the nasty effect, right the more uncivil comments get the more people see bias. So this is the dotted line
The solid line though is a group where we had the exact same
Blog post the exact same comments except for we inserted one line and said this comment has been removed by a moderator
So there was we simply gave the impression that there was a parent in the room
Of course, there was no real moderation. There's which fixed comments that were just in to experimental conditions
So the only difference between those two groups, is that in one group?
There was the perception that they were there was some form of oversight
The moment you give the perception of oversight that nasty effect becomes a lot less
Pronounced and in fact doesn't it's not significant anymore. So in other words it becomes a lot more
moderate simply because people think well, yeah, they may be yelling and screaming but at least somebody's watching so
Maybe the article is not as biased after all as I thought it was because that's really the highly problematic effect, right?
So this so the ethical issues for journalism, of course, are a different question
Meaning I'm telling my readers that there's moderation even though there is no moderation
Just to avoid that nasty effect. That's a different question
But at least the mechanism
functions so for the sake of
Leaving enough time for discussion. I want to just talk about a few
Intentionally provocatively phrased conclusions that you can hopefully totally disagree with me on and we can have a conversation about this
but political science who I
Think many people in communication would love to be psychology sociology political science and we should so desperately want to be a real social
Scientific discipline as told you it would be more somewhat provocatively phrase
But they're also lessons to be learned because political science has a long history of being targeted by people like Tom Coburn and others
as a target of
withdrawing NSF funds that go to the social behave behavioral economic sciences
and this started
It didn't even start but first bubble to the public forefront in
2009
when they really went after the SPE budget of the National Science Foundation and
Political science had to engage in a little bit of a soul-searching about how relevant
They really are and I think there were people were saying how do they not understand how important political sciences and they were?
Others like Peter katzenstein at Cornell who also happens to be a fellow German
who said this and the only thing I disagree with him is the beginning of this that grad students because I actually think
Grad students are not the issue here grad students are the ones who do very often think about the larger problems
I think the problem
Are those of us who
Obsess over the fourth decimal point of a multinomial logit rather than the larger problems and this is exactly what peter katzenstein said
If we don't make contributions to the large sloppy
Unmanageable problems of our time the problems that don't have easy solutions and we may never solve them
But if we don't try we're not gonna think back to the cheesemakers the large
Problems that society faces in that we as universities
Are making contributions to and so he basically took his own discipline to task and said if you guys don't
Tackle the big questions you shouldn't be surprised if society asks you why you exist
And I think to some degree
Communications sometimes has a little bit of the and I'm saying this having been trained within the discipline working within the discipline and
publishing very often within the discipline
I think we have some similar issues
And I think we have a high tolerance and I picked three areas here that are all
solidly in my wheelhouse meaning I've
Done exactly what I'm accusing the discipline of doing which is why I'm singling those out
I think one is we have an unbelievable tolerance for contradictions
we will let
Strands of literature proceed that directly contradict each other a lot of people at Wisconsin have for a long time done research including myself
That shows that heterogeneous networks networks of people that that are full of non
like-minded others that exposed me to ideas that are not my own that challenge my viewpoints that
Though is are good for participation. They make me more efficacious. They make me seek more information. They make me more participatory
Diana Matz at Penn who used to be at, Wisconsin
Has a line of research that says the exact opposite that says if you're exposed to
Polarizing information it may make you apathetic. It may create cross-pressures that
Basically make you stuck and you don't know what to do and you don't engage in political activity anymore at all
Have you resolved it?
some people have tried to but we've basically tolerated this as two lines of research that each are well published and each are
Directly contradict the other so I think that's one our what I call intra
disciplinary contradiction, but I think there also a lot of
Interdisciplinary contradictions and framing I think is a really good example
I showed you earlier the idea of Frankenstein and and frankenfood and and and the Franken label
Why is it such an effective tool of communication because I don't give you a single fact
I'm not persuading you of anything. All I'm doing is I'm connecting a technology if that's synthetic biology or GMO is to a mental bucket
To science going too far putting stuff together that doesn't belong together transgenics that stuff getting in Frankenstein screws through his head
Right, not Frankenstein the Frankenstein's monster
the monster getting out of the lab
All of that because of scientific hubris
being impossible to rein in and you can see how the metaphor works perfectly for things like GMOs and others so
Why is framing such an important thing because in our discipline we treat a lot of things as framing that a lot of other
Disciplines don't treat as framing if you look at the early Kahneman and Tversky work that ended up winning them a Nobel Prize
it's a very narrow slice of
Equivalence framing that doesn't line up with most of the framing work we do in the discipline does communication care
No, do they care if we're understood by psychology and by behavioral economics? No, we don't
we just continue the fact that we don't have meaningful conversations across and again, I told you it would be
provocative and simplistic
The doesn't necessarily matter to many of us and shantou and garner and I have written about this in a bunch of places
But but we can come back to that. So that's what I would call
interdisciplinary contradictions, and then I think the last one is and this is especially as we're doing more and more computational work is
We're doing a lot of work that is not concerned at all with media effects meaning with real influences
what we're doing instead is we're and this is the
infamous drunkard search right
the person who is crawling on his knees under the streetlight and a cop is asking what he's doing and
Well, I'm looking for my car keys and look whether you lose them is like well over their back next to the bar
so I do search here well because the light is better and the
We do the exact same thing when we do yet another and again, this is work that I've done
another analysis on Twitter because Twitter is publicly available and we don't do analyses on
Interchanges on Facebook for instance that are behind a password wall. Why because we can't get to the data
But people like Salomon Messing and others of course have demonstrated quite convincingly
I think that a lot of the the exchanges that we have behind pay walls
behind password walls rather with
Sources closest to us family sources have a much higher chance of getting non like-minded information in cross than others
So this is really where the effects are instead
We're looking on Twitter which is used by a very narrow slice of Americans
Simply because it's available simply because this is where we can where we can program
The API Twitter is not as bad as Facebook that they changed the api's all the time
So it's easier to scrape and so on and so forth. I'm and it's ultimately not the most
Productive move forward so the general idea of us
Engaging in methodological convenience rather than
Finding the best available data for the phenomenon. We're trying to test
I think it's the third one and then of course just because I like South Park I think you know
we're doing a lot of the same studies again and again and again, I'm gonna
Framing is probably a really good example that's close to my heart the third-person effect. Same thing
we've known since
1983 that it exists and there are important strands of research surrounding it. But we keep coming back to a lot of the the
same studies that probably are
Not always as useful
So I think I want to leave with three ideas that I think we're gonna be asked as a discipline more and more
A and if you haven't read it as a great piece by Duncan Watson the inaugural issue of nature human behavior
Where he basically calls for
solution oriented social science
And now that's that's easier said than done for somebody like Duncan who works or still works for a couple more weeks for Microsoft Research
It's going to Penn as an integrated knowledge professor
But I think the or the article is well reasoned
It's not just a you guys need to be more application focused. It is really a well reasoned
overview of the constrains of academia and everything else and of course if you think about where the origins of our discipline
lies both in terms of the data sets that people like Lazos found and others used from
women's magazines and very applied problems that they research
But also to what I showed you earlier the land-grant
University and the idea of teaching which is what the congressional language that teaching farmers to grow two blades of grass instead of one
So very goal-oriented
Background to the kinds of work that we've been doing
I think there are lots of other indications why this has been from the from day one in our DNA in Illinois?
Man who I mentioned my adviser in Germany got a degree in newspaper studies
That was actually that agreed when she studied in Berlin, so I think that's number one
I think we really do need to start making contributions much more than we have in the past to the larger societal problems
I think we need to think about the foci of our discipline and what the means
Maybe communication needs to continue to exist. Maybe it's gonna be an information science and communication field
Maybe it's gonna be something else
We have tried to do some of that work with a standing committee that Matt mentioned in the introduction
For the National Sciences Academy of Sciences engineering and medicine the standing committee and science communication research in practice
Where we're trying to map the discipline and and Jeff and West actually was here in the information school
Has done great work for us helping us
Kind of do the the citation
Pattern and and and kind of crawling side of things
So that's I think the second one and I honestly don't have an answer for you where I think
Communication will be I can promise you that it doesn't look like the way communication looks like at, Wisconsin
we're three different departments in the two different colleges and
50 different degrees that cut across or don't
But the last thing that I'll mention is I think we it has huge implications for how we train students
And I co-chaired I chaired rather committee at Wisconsin on the future of undergrad education. And how do we prepare students?
I was one of the key questions we asked ourselves
For jobs that don't exist yet and that we don't know will exist. So why is a Washington degree?
Why is it Wisconsin degree a Harvard or UCLS degree at UCLA degree?
Why are they worth anything 20 years from now?
when most of the media tools that were teaching when most of the other things that we're teaching will no longer be around and
What does that mean for for how we educate children?
Google of course when they bought deepmind the first thing they did is they created an ethics board
Which was a bit of an interesting exercise and we can raise questions about how successful that was or not
but the reason they created this not because they knew what they were doing and where they were going but because they didn't know where
They were going that's what they were saying very explicitly and I think we're a little bit in the same spot with higher education
That we don't really know where we're going
But we need to prepare students to go there and in communication
I think that challenge is probably more urgent than it is for most other fields
So on that really optimistic note, I'm gonna leave it at that. Thank you so much for having me
Perfect, thanks very much Dietram so we have plenty of time for questions. Why don't we just get started and Dietram I'll let you
You know, polarization
Congratulations to you on that
My question really is a what-if situation
You have three participating groups
They are given a set of facts
They're asked to predict the outcome of
Artificial intelligence on humanity two of these groups are polarized groups. The third participant is AI
what do you think is going to happen?
The third participant oh is AI?
Well, so here's the tricky part
You're asking somebody who doesn't program AI?
and the funny thing is if you ask people who do program AI they sometimes don't know the answer either a really good example is
deep minds AI for example
If you show it a picture of a retina of a human retina can with a 95% certainty
Predictive that retinas from a male or from a female. No human doctor can do this at all
The interesting thing about that story is not that the interesting thing about the story is that that the engineers a deep mind don't know
What the algorithm actually does so they don't know either
They just know that it does it with a 95 percent certainty. And so a lot of that work is actually still blackbox
Why because it's basically capacity and of course
We're constrained by our life cycle out a lifetime
Meaning we have limited capacity as human beings and we have limited capacity
Computational in our brain now those constraints are largely gone when we work with deep
we just finished a white paper for deep mind and when we work with them were saying well, you know, so what kind of
Experiments and and online assignments do you do and I look well we don't do that many because it's really expensive
It's actually hundreds of millions of dollars
Sometimes and our question is how do you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an online
algorithmic experiment?
Any answer is it's so much
computational power and it's computational power that comes from the same service that our Gmail runs on and
Our and all of our Android phones run on that. It's actually not that easy to do so long story short
I don't know if AI comes to a better conclusion
There's a bunch of indicators that says we're not quite there yet
one was the Facebook example where the two bots started talking to one another in a language that they were allowed to develop and
Facebook forgot to tell them that that language had to be English or human and so they started developing their own language and eventually the
The programmers couldn't understand it anymore and turned it off
There's another episode where Google had their AI
Tested in stressful situation and it became more and more aggressive in all the stressful situations. So they also didn't proceed with that
so I think we're even in AI aware ways away from
from
You know ideal decision making and partly then this is the last thing I'll say of course
It's because we're a AI is only as good as the training
I mentioned the moral choices that cars make they're made they're basically trained by having human coding and forming an algorithm
And the same thing of course is true when when it comes to AI being able to predict
race or
identifying rather facial features
and the fact that Palo Alto is not the most diverse place under the Sun and so it's the AI is much better at at
Picking certain racial groups and and and facial features than for others
Because that's where the learning data comes from
And so I think we're I'm at this point not very optimistic
yet that AI is gonna come up with a with a better way of
Predicting it. It certainly is going to take more information into account just because it can
But that's certainly the next really really big issue. I think across the sciences including
Genetics and if you look at where Google's invest in Google's investing in basically three different fields
one is genetics and they've hired a lot of really good geneticists out of UCSF and elsewhere and 23andme of course was
founded by the ex-wife of Sergey Brin
Co-founder of Google the second one is AI meaning how can we use machine learning to make sense of?
large patterns of DNA
That much of which we don't understand in human DNA for instance
So I need you know, ideally 7.5 billion people and all the DNA to fully get at the patterning and the number 3 data
Meaning if I know all your data from all the searches you did in
That's you have pain here in my side and maybe it's kidney. I don't know if that's my kidney is whatever
You know, maybe it's kidding something and then if you have all your health data all of us with our Apple watches
You know that are consistent that are constantly producing data data data
If I can put that together with your genetics data with your AI
So that's where Google is going in terms of actually being able to make better predictions for personalized medicine
And I think that's where the future is gonna be
that was a long answer to a short question, but
My question is
How to communicate to the public effectively
something
Scientific findings that might be so challenging that may challenge some fundamental
Believes for example in the future I can imagine that we will have perhaps evidence
scientific evidence to show that
free will is perhaps just a result of
Biochemical processes that people do not have free will at all. It's just a myth and fiction
How would you like to communicate that idea to the public? So
When it comes to communicating things to the public, I think
And again, I would say to the public I would push back on to elements of that one is there's no single public, right?
There's lots of different publics
And I mean you can slice them in so many different ways I think public's are highly dynamic
And then I'm not sure that I would argue even
To the that we should argue should communicate to the public. Why because it assumes that we have the right answer and
Although public's do not when I say we I mean a scientific community that is true for scientific facts
But that's not the problem with a question that you're raising
If the question is not do we know that and is that now biochemically or however else?
Proven the question is how does that challenge our value systems and are we go how do we translate that into policy?
and other things or into our sense of self-worth or
Whatever else so I think it's really the question of how do we communicate with various publics about this?
And what are the what are the outcomes?
so the question is
For the scientific community. What are the conclusions?
And two things one is it's the question is should we move ahead with research that finds things like this
and here's where I think there's there's a scale right and  that scale the
using Alan Lester's example of the bi-directional dialogue
I think most scientists now will and will embrace that model and say we need broad public engagement
What that could mean at one extreme though and Vicky Calvin who used to be at Rice as a toxicologist?
She's now Provost at at Brown I think
She was at stage at one of the first colloquia that we did on science communication
She basically said if you want engagement
You need to be ready when the public tells you to shut down your lab
You need to be ready to shut down your lab. Otherwise, it's not an honest bi-directional dialogue
otherwise
It's still you telling the public what you want to do and if we're honest most of the things that we do as science
Communicators is exactly that if we talk about we do science on tap we go to a bar
We're really jovial. You talk to people doesn't mean I'm gonna close my lab
I don't really care what you know and a lot of scientists
Well will say I don't really care if they tell me to close down my lab. I will still not do it
Ultimately, they see it still as an educational
Exercise and I think that's where our problem comes in that a lot of I think your example is a really good one
The the chimeric embryos are a really good one the idea of us getting to the points where really our comfort zone is
where all of us are getting to the limits of our comfort zone?
For me think about AI that's  where I'm sure that AI can do research better than I can eventually
and
Well, there's human creativity. That's exactly what deep mind is working on. Right? Can we replicate all these things?
so for me as a researcher, I
May be totally obsolete. Do I like that idea - no, but I think
When you say how do we communicate that? I think this is exactly why we need those broader public debates
Should we have pre-emptive policing the idea of pre-crime that I showed you? every police person many policemen will tell you or police
Officers will tell you that's a good idea
if I know what the risks are going into certain situations that
Improves the chances that I will go home to my family tonight and still be alive
if
I'm a person of a particular racial group or
Who lives in a particular neighborhood? I mean, that's the worst possible idea that's directly at odds with
issues of human dignity or the Constitution or whatever else so
And this is what it when I said wicked problem at the end most of the problems we're dealing with don't have a best-case scenario
Outcome for climate change there's a whole host of outcomes
Or of strategies forward that we could engage in all of which has to have upsides and downsides
Nobody that there's no way of moving forward and climate change that doesn't require
Some compromise of some sort among all of us
Same thing is true for any other issue. So I think ultimately the question is how do we as a society have a
broader discussion about these wicked problems and about
relatively speaking the best path forward because there is no
Objectively best path forward and I think the issue that you mentioned is a really good example
So it's not how do we communicate to different publics how to do this?
But how do we have a broader societal debate that includes the best available science?
But also all the other ethical political regulatory issues that as I showed you are very different in the u.s
Than there elsewhere and our debate different elsewhere than there in the US
I've kind of a two-part question about anti-vaccination
The first is that
Anti-vaxxers seem to exist on both sides of the political spectrum and across a very large
Ideological base, so I'm wondering if it is
Reasonable or if we should even have the goal of having a single strategy of combatting anti-vaccination
And the second part of that is how do you have this kind of bi-directional?
dialogue where you acknowledge the lack of trust and the fear while still rejecting
Evidence from anti-vaxxers that is patently false such as like vaccines cause autism, how do you kind of navigate?
yeah, yeah, and I'm gonna throw in before I answer I'm gonna throw in another complication and that is
Vaccinations are also one of these really good exam or anti VAX
The anti-vaccination movement is a really good example of a movement that actually weirdly uses science
So a lot of people say well it's totally anti-science. But the reason they continue to stick with Wakefield is
because it's a study that was in a
high-end Medical Journal and said right and
Very often and you see the same thing for the seralini study for GMO is the rat study and the tumor study
That the argument is how did this get through peer review? How did this get among the top journals?
And then why does it get pulled the moment it contradicts?
Industry what they perceive as industry
benefit and so people actually who are on some people on the anti-vaccine side are making arguments that are deeply
embedded in scientific reasoning now the fact that this study has been
Retracted that Wakefield lost his medical license then becomes
You know collateral damage in that in that logical chain
but so for vaccines and I think you're absolutely right that vaccines and vaccine vaccine hesitancy, and or outright rejection is
Is  not independent, but happens on both ends of the political spectrum
I'll mention a few things number one and there's great work by Brendan Nyhan who has done work in Pediatrics where he published
What he tried to basically do interventions and tell parents who were already reluctant
He had different groups, but the one group I'll talk about parents who were reluctant to vaccinate their children
And he did a bunch of interventions
Narrative interventions and so on. One of them is the straight CDC. This is was a bad idea intervention
When you then look at how likely they are to vaccinate their children after the intervention
The corrective group meaning the one that got all the counter information does more poorly than the curtain in the control condition
Meaning if I hadn't talked to these people at all
They would be more likely to vaccinate their children then after I forced him to dig in and basically what he calls a backfire effect
I think there was a little bit of over claiming on that paper not by Brandon but by other people who read it
So it's probably not as widespread always a phenomenon, but it's a really interesting kind of thing
But HAP what can happen if you're if you talk top down I as a scientist know what's right for you kind of an appalled
Off it at Penn kind of way and why that very often doesn't help right?
If I go to to Jenny McCarthy who thinks that her son Evans autism was triggered. I think it's what she calls it by vaccines
Then
Talking down to that person and basically tell him here's all the reasons. Why are you wrong?
Probably doesn't help number two is I think we've done a pretty poor job
And and this is where I'm gonna borrow from a rhetorician
I'm Kathleen Hall Jamieson has talked about this and she's convinced that the idea of herd immunity is a really bad
Label, and I'm not an expert on this on veterans by a by any stretch
but the ideas who wants to be part of a hurt that goes over a cliff or does whatever else right because everybody else does
It that's why I'm doing it
And so she's argued and it's a bit of a more awkward term, but she's argued that maybe a term like community
immunity or others may be better terms meaning you're really doing something for the larger community
Rather than your being part of a herd. And so I think we haven't really thought about the complexities and how we
Communicate those things and then I think number three as I said and this comes back to my first point. I do think that
Acknowledging the fact and not engaging in reasonable questions that people are asking them
So this is this came up at a previous meeting
A person comes up to me and she says well, you know
When I grew up we only had this many vaccines now
We have all these additional vaccines and I want to know why that is and our typical response is
just doctors know better and I think that's not a good way of communicating right especially when it comes to decisions that
that
Parents make a lot of irrational decisions about their children and I'm saying this with having no experience parenting
I'm so only on the receiving end of parenting. So but I think you know people are helicopter parents
Is that a good decision? No people, you know, don't let their children. Do XYZ. Is that always a good decision? No
I'm sure most parents would admit that, you know
sometimes they're not the most rational choices, but their choices that they're doing because they love their children and
And that's the kind of environment that we're going into and we're saying and then we're saying well
Here are all the facts and this is why you should behave differently
ultimately it all comes back to that knowledge deficit kind of model thinking that
that model is typically used in science communication as a very
outdated idea that if I just gave you the right facts
then you would think like a scientist and
We all know of course that that's not at all how things work
Most of us make most decisions based on very limited amounts of information
In political science and in psychology, which clefts call this the cognitive misers or model for a long time
Yeah, by the time you got here you've made at least I don't know how many how many dozens and dozens and dozens of decisions
about
people that you've never met if they're dangerous to you if they may mug you or if they may kill you or
Whatever else you didn't make any of those decisions consciously
But as you walk down the street you look at for all these cues and you make these decisions with absolutely no information whatsoever
Yet we all make them all the time. Why did I come in here today and wear this?
Has no rational reason for this right?
There's no rational reason for anybody to ever wear a strip of cloth around their neck and it's actually not that comfortable either I can
tell you
but I do it because one doesn't mean so I mean I
constantly make basically this and I think vaccinations are not are not any different and so ultimately
How do I connect with a parent on the value that matters to them and not in a corrective kind of heres
why I'm telling you why you're wrong and I think a lot of the work that brandon has been doing
also with the Vermont Department of Health is really interesting in terms of working with people on the ground trying to
Trying to really figure out interventions that work in a day to day basis he's at Michigan
No, you did all that work when he was at Dartmouth
So my questions related with the chart
He showed us it's very interesting. You pointed out - outlier there US and China
So my question is twofold it. why They're related with communication discipline the other is somehow related with
political science or
international relations
To what degree do you think the the science communication issue is a u.s. Issue
Because you show most of the country if the economic development reach a certain point
There's no dispute on on science communication, right and there's no trouble of their people
Yeah atheist. This is a u.s. Problem
So whenever we have an issue
We always say have climate
change communication science communication health communication and we see this kind of a proliferation of issue based communication and
without addressing
Th call things. What's wrong with us? And how can we talk about saving the
how to say save the fire without talking the fire
I mean we interns in terms of communication into a kind of constant finance of of the message
From to a sophistry. So I think this is enough to it's not enough to solve the problem
The other thing is the - outlier you see China and us on the chart. Oh
Can you predict that the Chinese like atheist communist regime is?
more suitable for future tech features of technically when they brace the are the
technology
without any kind of resistance from religion or any kind of other things you see they are they're leaving the
5g they are leaving the betraying they are leaving even on WeChat and any other you know
Social score and those kind of things, you know, so this is a two-fold question. All right. Those are two really easy questions
What's wrong with the US and doing it more atheism to promote science?
the
So the first one there's actually there's nothing wrong at all with the US and I'll
Tell you based on data why that is
And I'll give you two things
One is if you ask in and this has been done as part of the General Social Survey if you actually ask the US public
for example on on to questions evolution and Big Bang
if if evolution is the best way of describing how life develops on earth and if the Big Bang is the best explanation of how
origins of the universe
If you ask this question in Japan and China in Europe, and they collapse the data for Europe
Which makes little sense to you know?
Put it away Nia and with Portugal and whatever else but Europe China, Japan you basically get about 80%
Endorsement more in all of these countries in the US you got about 40 so and to your point. Is there something wrong?
But that depends on how you ask the question and what the GSS did they basically displayed ballad and they asked 1/2 the the standard?
Evolution question and the other half is according to scientists
That's how life developed or for Big Bang according to scientists and all of a sudden when you ask according to scientist
The number goes to 80% exactly by the rest of the world is so what does that mean?
That means that we know what we're supposed to know. We just refuse to know it
All right. So so we know exactly what the facts are. We just going. Yeah, but that still doesn't matter to me
So is there something wrong or not? I think at least factually there's nothing wrong. We know exactly what the facts are
They simply contradict our value system and that's where our problem comes in. Is that a unique u.s. Problem?
I'm not sure so and here's my
Counter-argument the National Academies of Sciences engineering and medicine about three years ago came out with a report that went through
1600 peer-reviewed studies looking at the health effects
And this the Pacific Northwest may not be the place to make this argument, but I'll make it anyway
That there's no piece of evidence that suggests that eating genetically modified crops is any less safe than eating?
Traditionally grown crops National Academies of Sciences engineering medicine says look, we went to every single study. There's no evidence
that doesn't stop Germany highly you saw that at the bay and
From rejecting GMOs outright right and basically saying look this is we don't believe the science
So rejecting scientific consensus on GMOs in Germany is not any different from rejecting scientific census on climate in the US
So is there something uniquely?
Different about the US. I think there is in terms of religiosity
I think that's a value that's much more pronounced here than it is in most other
developed countries, but that's just a function or that's just a
Part of the infrastructure and the configuration
I think that we need to take into account and I don't think that necessarily you
Produces unique problems climate in particular I would push back
What we did for climate change. We took a 2000 election that worked out by the way exactly like the 2016 election
Right. We have Al Gore running out of a Clinton White House
Being predicted to win the the electoral vote by about 70% of the vote. He
loses
The electoral vote he wins the popular vote reminiscent of 2016 loses his home state
Then Florida happens, right and we'd need to do a bunch of recounts
You have time for recounts and Al Gore Sue's in front of the Florida Supreme Court
Then Sues from the US Supreme Court
Eventually, the US Supreme Court says doesn't turn the election for Gore but a few weeks in basically says enough
We're stopping the recount. Now, wherever we are, we stop and Bush 43 becomes president. The country has never been this divided
the
Republicans walk around with signs that say Gore
Loser a sore loser man for a Gore and Lieberman
Right and the Democrats to this day believe that the election was stolen from them by the Supreme Court
So what do we do we take whatever that figure was who's sued in front of both supreme courts
I mean, oh like that guys from now on in charge of climate change one of the most polarizing
Partisan figures and and so but that wasn't enough, right?
So let's pile on let's give him an Oscar from the fundraising arm of the Democratic Party Hollywood for an inconvenient truth
Still not enough. Let's give him a Grammy for best audio book for An Inconvenient Truth
Because really we need to pile it on and then of course the the Nobel Committee
Which is also not known for embracing conservative causes in the u.s
Gives him a Peace Prize and and him in the IPCC. So
Ultimately, I think that is a bit of a self-made problem the fact and and Bob Inglis
Who is a congressman Republican former congressman out of South Carolina who lost re-election
To a tea party candidate when he embraced climate change speaks to this quite powerfully. It basically says look what happened is for any self-respecting
Republican this was the Democrats using
science as a tool
To get regulations through that they couldn't get through electoral II
And I think this is what's so dangerous about the statements from a Neil deGrasse Tyson
that are anti religion or that Ed mock religion or from a from a Michael Mann that
reinforce the idea that we're a bunch of liberals and partisans the scientific community is
Because we're really feeding that that misperception so you a second question
about religion
That's I mean, I think it's an interesting question
I think there's there's the Germany is which ends up a little bit higher on
This is I think a counter example of a country where I'm I grew up in West Germany the South
Highly developed. Lots of investment in science is actually fairly religious
the reason why Germany dipped is because
After the reunification they added 20 million people would live under communist rule for a long time. And basically
Levels of religiosity just plummeted because you put a bunch of zeros and in the mean and you mean goes out
And that's what ended up happening. So I think Germany isn't is a good counter-example where you know
That's not necessarily the to are not necessarily at odds with on
I think the US for a long time was a good counter example, I think what the u.s. Right now is is
Where u.s. Is that the u.s. Is often rallied around
Crucial events the Manhattan Project being a really good example
Meaning scientists urging the president look there's called free is creating the nuclear bomb
We need the Manhattan Project the fact that a few years later
They wrote another letter saying please don't apply the technology we urge you to create is a different question
Sputnik moments and so on and I
spoke recently to a member of the House Science Committee a
Republican member of the House Science a staffer of the House Science Committee and his answer was just to come back to China
What he was saying is what we need in the u.s
is we need the Chinese to go to the moon and
Land a person on the moon and on the way back pick up that flag that we still have up there that American flag
Folded up and stop by the White House and drop it off and all of a sudden we're gonna have the biggest
Investment in science and technology in the US
And there may be some truth to that
I don't know if that's gonna happen anytime soon. But I think I think we've been very responsive
around some of the
international kind of comparison issues the the last thing I'll mention it is I think we need to wrap up is the is
there's a great and very interesting story about a guy named Ed You
Y-o-u who was a special agent for the FBI, and he's really interested in
basically a theft of DNA data and building the largest databases in China and the Chinese apparently most of the thefts of
US patient data that have occurred were not about patient data or financial data
But about getting actually their DNA data to build the largest possible DNA data set
Because of course the Chinese are also getting to the point where they're sequencing the DNA all newborn babies
That would give him an unbelievable competitive advantage religion or not
And already the Chinese are out publishing us on in scientific journals on most issues
Nana was one of the first ones
so I think there the question that you're raising is going to be an interesting one and continue on moving forward a kind of a
Good answer really?
So I know that there are more questions. Oh, we have a reception in the next room just down the hall
So in CMU 126, so please join us and please join me. Thank you. Thank you so much
