A guest blog by Gary Kass, Principal Specialist in Strategic Futures at Natural England

The London-based Science Media Centre (SMC) describes itself as “an independent venture working to promote the voices, stories and views of the scientific community to the national news media when science is in the headlines” and sets out its “ultimate goal” as being “to facilitate more scientists to engage with the media, in the hope that the public will have improved access to accurate, evidence-based scientific information about the stories of the day.”

Recently, the SMC produced a discussion document on “Climate Science in the Media” aimed at scientists and science press officers to encapsulate “some of the lessons we believe science has learned from previous media frenzies.”  The SMC acknowledges that people may disagree with some of the advice and wants to stimulate a debate.  Roger Pielke’s blog already has a discussion going on this already and this is my contribution to the debate.

Having been a scientific adviser to the UK parliament and government when MMR and GM broke and being responsible for delivering the government’s policy on public engagement with science between 2004 and 2007, I can fully understand why SMC is doing this and agree with much of the advice set out in its guidance…

For me, though, Point 9 (headed “Hang on in there – it will calm down”) is the most helpful.  It includes a great a quote from Michael Simmons, Director of Populous: “People tend to make judgements over time based on a whole range of different sources.” This is the most important point in the SMC’s advice:  don’t panic!  And there are good reasons to support this.

The social amplification of risk discourse supports the idea that people (let’s not pigeon-hole individuals under the patronising heading of ‘the public’) are sophisticated consumers of media:

• people calibrate their media (i.e. they rarely every access only one source and they play different sources off each other to arrive at their views)
• the media gives people things to talk about but does not tell them what to think; and, as they get new things to think about, people change their opinions – but, crucially, there’s no way that you can predict how they’ll change them
• finally people will often consume media that supports their own views anyway (psychologists call this confirmation bias).

When things like ClimateGate happen, many (but not all) in the science community panic, but in my view much of this is down to some scientists’ continued misunderstanding of both the public and the impact of media.  I have argued long and hard about the need to turn Public Understanding of Science on its head and to build capacity in the science community for scientists to understand the publics (from PUS to SUP).

It is not ‘science’ or ‘scientists’ that people distrust (I commissioned two national opinion polls over a number of years that showed this quite clearly).  What people are uneasy about is the ‘governance’ of science and technology.  Where people smell a rat and suspect collusion they will react against it.

But here’s the rub:  often the only way that they can really express their views is through negative reaction against the science or technology at hand (be it climate change, nanotech, GM, MMR or nuclear power)… It is what the social scientists call ‘affect’:  people don’t really take against technology itself, but many dislike arrogant (and often this means American and multi-national) companies and the feeling that Government is colluding with them to force it down their throats.  This feeling is not specific to any single area of science or technology, but is a manifestation of wider social trends such as declining trust in government and big business.  If scientists had a better understanding of publics and what’s behind much of the reaction they rail against, they might sleep easier in their beds.

But while science is about contested knowledge, in the media-driven, circus-like atmosphere we live in now, scientists can’t expect to have the luxury of the time, space and seclusion for considered reflection, testing and evaluation… it’s science in the wild (or ‘post-normal science’ as Jerry Ravetz and Silvio Funtowicz would have it).

However, many in the science community, in not understanding this fully, tend to think that ‘the public’ (and many only ever see the multiple publics in the singular) reaction is against the technology itself and then compound this error by extending this to a belief that because people are against a particular technology that they are against all areas of science and all technologies – often manifest in accusations that people are ‘anti-science’, ‘luddite’ or ‘irrational’.  This is a dangerous fallacy.  In a democracy, we should neither expect nor desire everyone to be unquestioningly supportive of all science and all technology in all situations… North Korea anyone?

Lastly, while in government I tried (with limited success) to convince the natural science community to realise that in situations like this it is perhaps best to go to the social science and humanities experts to get their views about these wider issues.  It is insufficient to rely on natural scientists to defend their science and the way they do it.  While scientists have a role in identifying risks, they are not judge and jury and the scope for wider stakeholder and public perspectives in framing, evaluating and managing risks is vast.

I ask this as a natural scientist who woke up to this need to be ‘reflexive” in the early 1990s after banging my head against a brick wall with what I thought  was the classic ‘sound science and professional judgement’ approach.  The simple fact is that the world doesn’t work like that and there are decades of social science and philosophy that have explored the nature and workings of science and the interactions with publics from which we can all learn.  For me, the key lesson is to avoid assuming a deficit of either understanding or trust on the part of ‘the public’ towards ‘science’ and to focus more on building a trustworthy system for science and technology – with an ARTful (accountable, responsible and transparent) governance at its heart.

I wouldn’t wish to give the SMC advice, but clearly, enabling greater reflection by scientists on their capacity and willingness to gain a more sophisticated understanding of publics and their limitations in addressing public concerns and shaping policy, might not go amiss.

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Gary Kass is currently Principal Specialist in Strategic Futures at Natural England, one of the UK’s statutory environmental advisory bodies.  Prior to this, Gary was Assistant Director, Science and Society in the UK Government’s Office of Science and Innovation and Senior Scientific Fellow at the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.