Science communication

Science communication encompasses a wide range of activities that connect science and society. Common goals of science communication include informing non-experts about scientific findings, raising the public awareness of and interest in science, influencing people's attitudes and behaviors, informing public policy, and engaging with diverse communities to address societal problems. The term "science communication" generally refers to settings in which audiences are not experts on the scientific topic being discussed (outreach), though some authors categorize expert-to-expert communication ("inreach" such as publication in scientific journals) as a type of science communication. Examples of outreach include science journalism and health communication. Since science has political, moral, and legal implications, science communication can help bridge gaps between different stakeholders in public policy, industry, and civil society.

Science communicators are a broad group of people: scientific experts, science journalists, science artists, medical professionals, nature center educators, science advisors for policymakers, and everyone else who communicates with the public about science. They often use entertainment and persuasion techniques including humour, storytelling, and metaphors to connect with their audience's values and interests.

Science communication also exists as an interdisciplinary field of social science research on topics such as misinformation, public opinion of emerging technologies, and the politicization and polarization of science. For decades, science communication research has had only limited influence on science communication practice, and vice-versa, but both communities are increasingly attempting to bridge research and practice.

Historically, academic scientists were discouraged from spending time on public outreach, but that has begun to change. Research funders have raised their expectations for researchers to have broader impacts beyond publication in academic journals. An increasing number of scientists, especially younger scholars, are expressing interest in engaging the public through social media and in-person events, though they still perceive significant institutional barriers to doing so.

Science communication is closely related to the fields of informal science education, citizen science, and public engagement with science, and there is no general agreement on whether or how to distinguish them. Like other aspects of society, science communication is influenced by systemic inequalities that impact both inreach and outreach.

Writing in 1987, Geoffery Thomas and John Durant advocated various reasons to increase public understanding of science, or scientific literacy. More trained engineers and scientists could allow a nation to be more competitive economically. Science can also benefit individuals. Science can simply have aesthetic appeal (e.g., popular science or science fiction). Living in an increasingly technological society, background scientific knowledge can help to negotiate it. The science of happiness is an example of a field whose research can have direct and obvious implications for individuals. Governments and societies might also benefit from more scientific literacy, since an informed electorate promotes a more democratic society. Moreover, science can inform moral decision making (e.g., answering questions about whether animals can feel pain, how human activity influences climate, or even a science of morality).

In 1990, Steven Hilgartner, a scholar in science and technology studies, criticized some academic research in public understanding of science. Hilgartner argued that what he called "the dominant view" of science popularization tends to imply a tight boundary around those who can articulate true, reliable knowledge. By defining a "deficient public" as recipients of knowledge, the scientists get to emphasize their own identity as experts, according to Hilgartner. Understood in this way, science communication may explicitly exist to connect scientists with the rest of society, but science communication may reinforce the boundary between the public and the experts (according to work by Brian Wynne in 1992 and Massimiano Bucchi in 1998). In 2016, the scholarly journal Public Understanding of Science ran an essay competition on the "deficit model" or "deficit concept" of science communication and published a series of articles answering the question "In science communication, why does the idea of a public deficit always return?" in different ways; for example, Carina Cortassa's essay argued that the deficit model of science communication is just a special case of an omnipresent problem studied in social epistemology of testimony, the problem of "epistemic asymmetry", which arises whenever some people know more about some things than other people. Science communication is just one kind of attempt to reduce epistemic asymmetry between people who may know more and people who may know less about a certain subject.

Biologist Randy Olson said in 2009 that anti-science groups can often be so motivated, and so well funded, that the impartiality of science organizations in politics can lead to crises of public understanding of science. He cited examples of denialism (for instance, climate change denial) to support this worry. Journalist Robert Krulwich likewise argued in 2008 that the stories scientists tell compete with the efforts of people such as Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar. Krulwich explained that attractive, easy to read, and cheap creationist textbooks were sold by the thousands to schools in Turkey (despite their strong secular tradition) due to the efforts of Oktar. Astrobiologist David Morrison has spoken of repeated disruption of his work by popular anti-scientific phenomena, having been called upon to assuage public fears of an impending cataclysm involving an unseen planetary object—first in 2008, and again in 2012 and 2017.