Yesterday (April 22, 2017) I attended a march for science. If you’re not familiar with the marches, head over to my friend Stephanie Hay’s blog post to learn a little about why scientists decided to march. TLDR: There were lots of reasons, but, more or less, people want knowledge and facts to become stronger forces behind the decisions that guide government action. It was invigorating to see so many people out there in support of knowledge, but there are a few things we need to keep in mind as we try to make science and knowledge effective forces for change.
1. Empathy, Empathy, Empathy
Many scientists are angry about the way decisions are being made in the US and throughout the world. This is understandable. After having done my PhD work in renewable energy and climate change, it frustrates me to no end to see these fields pushed aside. BUT, no amount of angry chanting, slogan writing, sign making, or even informative explaining will convince people that the problems so many scientists work so hard to solve are important.
If you lived in a small coal mining town where it was once possible to work in the coal industry your whole life and make a comfortable living, you wouldn’t be supportive of regulations that shut down coal-fired power plants. In fact, seeing few other options available to you and believing your entire livelihood was about to be destroyed, you’d probably be happy to see mining jobs come back; even if the long-term costs could be problematic, at least you could live with some chance of adapting to the problems later. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can start a conversation about science with a coal miner who disagrees with you using a snarky, science-y, anti-Trump sign. How could you possibly expect that person to relate to you?
Now, you might ask, why do I need to relate? Shouldn’t the truth be able to convince people? I wish it could, but, as a recent study on protest tactics showed, movements are more likely to succeed and recruit followers when people can relate to them (see NPR article segment on the study). The more you can identify with someone you are trying to convince, the more likely you are to convince them.
2. Extreme Rhetoric and Extreme Protesting Are Probably Not Useful
Despite common belief, people don’t necessarily avoid behaviors that are believed to be extremely or insurmountably risky. I’ll call this the “Screw it, I’m doomed anyway” principle. For example, work in Malawi showed that if men believed they had a 100% chance of contracting HIV by having sex with someone who was already infected, they were far less likely to use condoms than if they knew the actual, much lower, 10% chance. In a recent NPR report, the authors explain this as a kind of fatalistic approach to risk. If you’re told that you’re doomed, you don’t bother to change your action because, hey, you’re doomed anyway.
This has important consequences for the ways we talk about challenges facing the global community. If we simply start yelling “THE ECONOMY WILL IMPLODE WITHOUT NAFTA” … we’ll probably shut people off. Instead we might say, “I love being able to get fresh tomatoes for cheap at any time throughout the year, don’t you? …. Did you know that NAFTA is part of the reason you can get fresh tomatoes so cheaply? Pretty cool huh?”.
“Okay,” you might say, “but people will only start listening if I get extreme.” While it may be true that extreme protests get more news coverage, the same study on protest tactics I mentioned above found that protests using more extreme tactics are less likely to recruit people to a cause and may, in fact, have the opposite effect (again, you gotta be relatable!).
3. Jargon Sucks
I work at a biotech non-profit and many of my coworkers are not scientists. Despite the fact that they work around biologists and biology jargon everyday, we recently discussed the fact that many, many times they get lost once a scientist starts talking. This wasn’t unexpected – biology and molecular biology in particular is choc full of words that either a) have no meaning outside of biology or b) have biological meanings that make no sense when compared to their more general meanings (a good example, the term “gene expression”). Jargon makes my co-worker’s jobs more difficult and makes it harder for them to speak up in meetings for fear of looking stupid or making the meeting run too long.
What does this have to do with science advocacy or science marching? Researchers need to remember that, when they get around groups of peers, they are prone to start using alienating jargon that is nonsensical to people outside their specific fields. One of the quickest ways we make ourselves un-relatable and even a bit pretentious is to use jargon. So, while many of the more science-y signs at the march were quite cool and the messages were very good (loved the “Be like a proton, be positive” signs) they could have been more alienating than many of us realized (go ask a random group of ten people what a proton is). It’s certainly possible to make a relatable science march sign with a positive message: “Science brought us beer!” (slightly altered version of one of the great signs above).
Before I go, I’d like to reiterate that many people at the March for Science Boston (and I assume elsewhere as well) seemed to understand these points and did a great job. Hopefully we’ll see more positive science communication that will bring about effective policy change and community interactions in the months to come.