Unscientific America?
nisbetmc | June 30, 2010Held in over 30 countries, the World Wide Views on Global Warming initiative represents the state-of-the-art in new approaches to public engagement, the subject of several recent reports and meetings. This video features a short documentary on the Australian event.
Over the weekend, my friend Chris Mooney contributed an excellent op-ed to the Washington Post pegged to an American Academy of Arts and Sciences event yesterday. The op-ed previewed a longer essay by Chris released at the event in which he described some of the major themes expressed in the transcripts of three meetings convened…
nisbetmc | May 5, 2010
Chiwetel Ejiofor as geologist Adrian Helmsley in last year's blockbuster 2012 is one of the many emerging "hero" images of scientists in popular film and television.
In graduate school, I published with several colleagues a paper examining the portrayal of scientists in film and television and the relationship to audience perceptions. At last week's workshop on science and art in Alberta, I had the opportunity to return to this topic, one that remains much debated by commentators and scientists.
Contrary to conventional wisdom that entertainment media portray science and scientists in a…
nisbetmc | January 29, 2010
Much calamity has been made in popular books and by liberal commentators about the public's scores on quiz like survey questions tapping basic knowledge of scientific facts or the public's recognition of prominent figures in science.
Yet as social scientists have shown in various studies and have argued, we really shouldn't be surprised by the survey results on science literacy. Nor do studies find that these scores on literacy quizzes account for much of the variance in public opinion and perceptions about science-related debates, especially in comparison to other more influential factors…
nisbetmc | January 21, 2010
Last week the NSF Science Indicators report was released, triggering more dramatic calls to action and overstated warnings from commentators about the alleged decline of science in American society. This predictable reaction is part of a decades enduring "fall from grace narrative" about the place of science in American society, a distracting if not harmful myth that I discussed in a co-authored article with Dietram Scheufele published earlier this year.
Since Sputnik, each decade has spawned a novel form of this American jeremiad, whether it be the Cold War race against the Russians,…
nisbetmc | August 31, 2009Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Curtis Brainard previews some of the major themes and proposed initiatives from a new co-authored paper I have appearing at the American Journal of Botany. The article is scheduled for the October issue as part of a special symposium on science education and communication. A pre-publication author proof is available with the final paper online later this month. If you have been following the recent blog debates over science communication but have been looking for more substantive sources, this paper is probably for you. It's also a good introduction to…
nisbetmc | August 7, 2009Last week I participated in a two-day workshop at NSF on climate change education. The meeting brought together researchers in science education, communication, and informal learning; representatives from government agencies such as NOAA, the EPA, and NASA; and organizations such as the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. The presentations and discussions focused not only on school-based settings but also on public engagement campaigns, the news media, and the role of science centers and museums.
Among several participants, there was an emphasis on three…
nisbetmc | August 4, 2009As I noted when the Pew science survey was released last month, there was a disturbing tendency among some bloggers and commentators to seize upon the findings as yet more evidence of a "dangerous divide," a "widening disconnect," and a "gulf" between scientists and the public. I summarized some of the problems with this narrative at the time as did others.
In a follow up article at The Scientist titled "Are Scientists Really Out of Touch?," several researchers who have conducted similar surveys of scientists and the public have noted their own reservations about the "dangerous divide" claims…
nisbetmc | July 21, 2009As I noted last week, the Pew survey of scientists finds that more than 50% self-identify as liberals compared to just 20% of the public.
Which then leads to the question: what role does ideology play in shaping scientists' policy preferences relative to science, especially in those areas outside of their specialty? Or on those issues where there are high levels of uncertainty about risks, benefits, and trade-offs? Heuristic decision-making is common in politics and policymaking, are scientists as a group any different?
Put another way, in responding to the Pew findings, several commentators…
nisbetmc | July 12, 2009Over at the liberal blog site Daily Kos, the anonymous "Dark Syde" reviews the book Unscientific America. The review, unfortunately, echoes the all-too-common "fall from grace narrative" about the place of science in American society, a distracting if not harmful myth that we discuss in a forthcoming journal article and that I noted Friday.
All the trademark "fall from grace" metaphors, catchphrases, and references are included in the Daily Kos review including claims about a rise in "anti-science," "know-nothingness," open contempt for science, and a "long national slide into pseudoscience…
nisbetmc | July 10, 2009Over at MIT's Knight Science Journalism Tracker, the wise Charlie Petit has a great round-up of coverage of yesterday's Pew science survey. On what I described earlier today as a troubling "fall from grace" narrative in some reporting and commentary, Petit points to the obvious difficulties science reporters might have in covering an issue they deeply care about:
One notes that bylines [in coverge] tend to belong to science writers. Science writers can hope to cover science itself with a semblance of objective dispassion. But they have an inbuilt conflict of interest when the topic is the…
nisbetmc | July 9, 2009Somewhat predictably, several pundits and commentators have framed Thursday's Pew survey as supporting an all too common yet misleading "fall from grace" narrative about the place of science in society.
These interpretations proclaim a "growing disconnect," "a dangerous divide," a "widening gulf" and use other metaphors that are representative of what sociologists might label as a moral panic. This traditional fall from grace narrative about science argues for the need to return to a (fictional) point in the past where science was better understood and appreciated by the public. In the U.S…
nisbetmc | July 9, 2009[UPDATE: See this follow up on media reaction to the report.]
The Pew Research Center released today a major new survey report documenting Americans' views of science and technology and comparing these lay perceptions to a representative sample of U.S. scientists who are members of AAAS.
As part of a panel of experts, I had the chance to contribute input and ideas on the survey earlier this year. I have been eagerly looking forward to the findings ever since. Below I have jotted down a few key implications that come to mind on my first scan.
I will have more to say next week and probably…