Ethics and Practice in Science Communication

Susanna Priest, Jean Goodwin, Michael F. Dahlstrom, Susanna Priest, Jean Goodwin, Michael F. Dahlstrom

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226497815, 9780226540603
• eBook ISBN: 9780226497952
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

From climate to vaccination, stem-cell research to evolution, scientific work is often the subject of public controversies in which scientists and science communicators find themselves enmeshed. Especially with such hot-button topics, science communication plays vital roles. Gathering together the work of a multidisciplinary, international collection of scholars, the editors of Ethics and Practice in Science Communication present an enlightening dialogue involving these communities, one that articulates the often differing objectives and ethical responsibilities communicators face in bringing a range of scientific knowledge to the wider world.

In three sections—how ethics matters, professional practice, and case studies—contributors to this volume explore the many complex questions surrounding the communication of scientific results to nonscientists. Has the science been shared clearly and accurately? Have questions of risk, uncertainty, and appropriate representation been adequately addressed? And, most fundamentally, what is the purpose of communicating science to the public: Is it to inform and empower? Or to persuade—to influence behavior and policy? By inspiring scientists and science communicators alike to think more deeply about their work, this book reaffirms that the integrity of the communication of science is vital to a healthy relationship between science and society today.

PART ONE

How Ethics Matters

Why should science communicators reflect upon ethics? Translating complex science for non-expert audiences may be technically challenging, but it does not seem like there are special ethical requirements involved, beyond the straightforward ones of honesty and accuracy.

This first set of chapters demonstrates how this view of science communication is not only naive, but can impede the successful communication of science by failing to meet the normative expectations held by audiences and the broader responsibilities of scientists within society. Ethical considerations are not a supplementary component to the practice of science communication—they permeate every decision in preparing for a communicative task, constructing a message, and interacting with an audience. Paying no attention to underlying ethical considerations does not necessarily make a science communicator act in an unethical way, however. Science communicators, like other human beings, may orient themselves to unstated and even unconscious ethical norms without deliberate thought. However, lack of conscious attention to ethics does tend to render them unprepared to navigate the complex social and cognitive environment faced when trying to communicate science to non-experts.

Later chapters will explore specific professional contexts and case studies that further illustrate these ethical considerations. This first part provides the system-wide view of how ethics underpins all of science communication. In other words, ethics matters.

The opening chapter by Goodwin (chapter 1) uses speech act theory to demonstrate how the act of communication itself is more than a mere transmission of ideas but instead a social contract involving ethical expectations and promises to fulfill them. Goodwin reminds us that audiences are active participants in the communication process who have no obligation to pay attention to messages and often have very good reasons for critical scrutiny of the messages to which they choose to attend. To overcome this justified skepticism, communicators need to communicate in ways that make them vulnerable to the ethical expectations of their audience. Goodwin unpacks these often contrasting ethical expectations for four roles that science communicators are often asked to fill: exercising authority, reporting, advising, and advocating. In sum, successful science communication depends on the audience recognizing that they are in a trustworthy and ethical relationship with the communicator.

The communication of risk is a fundamental communication challenge that arises within most scientific fields. Yet Thompson (chapter 2) demonstrates that the ways communicators and audiences conceptualize risk arise from distinct, yet often completely unnoticed, ethical frameworks. As a consequence, risk communication created with the best of intentions can provoke a range of unintended responses, including confusion, frustration, or even controversy. Thompson clarifies how approaches to risk are often based on either a utilitarian ethical framework—the ends justify the means—or a Kantian ethical framework—the ends never justify limiting the autonomy of individuals. Likewise, while experts often think of risk assessments as value neutral, the common use of the word “risk” entails value-laden questions of attention, loss, and necessary action. Thompson argues that while there is no one correct ethical foundation from which to build a conceptualization of risk, remaining oblivious to ethical choices will continue to frustrate the goals of risk communicators.

Why engage in science communication at all? Is the goal to influence audiences toward a more pro-science perspective or to provide information needed for informed personal and collective decision making? While both may appear reasonable, the first goal is based on strategically persuading audiences while the second puts more stress on transparent and unbiased content. Priest (chapter 3) explores this deep tension within science communication—the serving of self-interested strategic goals versus deliberative democratic goals. Because both goals are ubiquitous in the current media environment, Priest also argues for a need to equip audiences with enough understanding of science to distinguish when they are faced with potentially misleading strategic versus informative science content—a concept she calls critical science literacy. Priest applies these concepts to a climate change context to show the ethics may not be as clear-cut as they seem in the messy intersection of science and society.

Finally, Sprain closes this part with a discussion (chapter 4) that expands this seeming dichotomy between strategic and democratic science communication goals into the unavoidable ethical question of framing. Framing represents the focus through which a larger phenomenon is presented in a message. Sprain describes how an earlier call for scientists to frame their messages met with resistance when many scientists interpreted it as a recommendation for them to engage in inappropriate “spin” or manipulation. However, every instance of communication is framed; communicators must select what to include and what to omit within a finite message as well as the specific words with which to capture the intended meaning. Because framing is inevitable, science communicators must constantly make ethical choices about how to do it. To help navigate these choices, Sprain introduces the concepts of framing-for-persuasion versus framing-for-deliberations. While neither type of frame is inherently unethical, Sprain argues that over the long haul, framing-for-persuasion is likely to undermine the democratic deliberation necessary to incorporate science into the decision-making process.

The role of these early chapters is to provide broad conceptual frameworks that illustrate particular discipline-specific approaches to issues of science communication ethics. While these frameworks can, in principle, be applied to the topics in any of the subsequent chapters, it is not our goal here to attempt the construction of a single inclusive framework for analyzing science communication ethics. This book represents a very young interdisciplinary subfield. Our goal here is to stimulate a broader conversation about what the study of science communication ethics might look like; it would be quite premature to represent that conversation as completed.

1

Effective Because Ethical: Speech Act Theory as a Framework for Scientists’ Communication

JEAN GOODWIN

Whenever we open our mouths, pick up a pen, or flip up the laptop to start typing, we draw on assumptions about how communication works. These assumptions guide us as we try to figure out what we are going to say and how we are going to say it. Although they usually aren’t made explicit, worked out systematically, or grounded in evidence beyond personal experience, these assumptions could be thought of as our personal “models” or “theories” of communication.

The English language has one such theory built into its very vocabulary. Consider phrases like put ideas into words; pack more thought into fewer words; thought content; get an idea across; convey ideas; make sure the meaning comes through; get meaning out of words; extract meaning. These and other ordinary ways of talking about communication reflect what has been called the “conduit” (Reddy, 1979) or “transmission” model of communication. This model invites us to think of communication as primarily information transfer. A communicator is imagined to be packing an idea-object into a suitable linguistic container and sending the package through an appropriate medium (conduit) to the receiver, who then is supposed to unpack the container and add the idea-object to his mental store. This view has been elaborated in explicit communication theory, most famously in Shannon and Weaver’s early transmission model (see Shannon & Weaver, 1949). But it is more widespread as an implicit mental model or folk theory. In particular, the conduit model of communication in general becomes the infamous deficit model when applied to the communication of science: the constantly reemerging, generally unstated assumption that the main task facing a scientist communicating with a nonexpert audience is to put her knowledge into understandable and interesting words in order to fill an audience’s mental void.

As noted in the introduction, the failings of the deficit model of science communication are many and long understood. Of particular interest to readers of this volume, the deficit model follows its parent conduit model in being ethically impoverished. Both models imply that the communicator has only the limited ethical responsibility of making sure that the transmission system works. She is responsible for choosing packaging that will make it through the conduit and be frustration-free for the audience to open. We might summarize this by saying that under conduit/deficit assumptions, a scientist is communicating ethically if she is communicating effectively. Beyond this core duty to be an effective transmitter, she has no particular responsibilities to receivers, who are imagined in this approach to play only a passive role.

But is this all a scientist is responsible for? Wynne’s classic case study (1989) showed how real audiences react when they are treated as empty-headed unpackers. Scientists who communicated about the dangers of Chernobyl fallout in the Lakes region of Great Britain succeeded mostly in generating distrust among affected sheep farmers because of failures of respect. The scientists didn’t try to find out what the farmers knew about the locale, didn’t consult farmers about how plans would impact their interests and practices, and didn’t consider the troubled history of prior interactions between scientists and farmers. “Distrust” and “disrespect”: these are ethically freighted words. Their presence reveals that there are ethical dimensions to science communication that go beyond the assumptions of the deficit model.

Many have called for replacing communication based on deficit model assumptions with approaches that emphasize dialogue or engagement between scientists and nonexpert audiences. While the ideals expressed in such calls are legitimate, one difficulty is that “dialogue” and “engagement” do not provide alternatives to the straightforward, intuitively compelling vision that the conduit model offers. “Dialoguing” just isn’t as vivid as packing and unpacking, and ordinary English doesn’t give us many metaphors for “engagement.” So even scientists and science communication professionals who aim higher tend to find deficit model assumptions sneaking back unrecognized into their theories and practices (Brossard & Lewenstein, 2010; Davies, 2008; Wynne, 2006).

In order to stop reinventing the deficit model and to realize the promise of engagement, we need to cultivate a different set of assumptions—a different folk theory of communication. This alternative viewpoint needs to respect the audience’s active role in communication; needs to allow for the development of a richer communication ethics; needs to fulfill the hopes expressed in talk of dialogue and engagement; and needs to be grounded in ordinary intuitions about how communication works. In the remainder of this chapter, I sketch how a perhaps surprising candidate—the philosophical theory of speech acts—can fulfill these four goals. A “speech act” is communication that in itself accomplishes a specific action, such as making a promise or lodging a complaint. As we will see, thinking of science communication as taking place through speech acts encourages us to pay attention to the ethics of communication.

In the following section, I summarize an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that draws inspiration from philosopher Paul Grice’s original work, and show how speech act theory provides a general conception of communication that emphasizes the communicator’s ethical responsibilities toward an active audience. I next demonstrate the power of speech act theory by using it to provide accounts of four quite different speech acts of special relevance to scientists contributing to public discussions: exercising authority, reporting, advising, and advocating. I close with a brief summary of the progress made, and a comparison of the speech act approach with the deficit model. In particular, I will wrap up by justifying my title: in the reverse of the view implicit in the deficit model, in the speech act approach science communication is only effective because it is ethical.

Speech Act Theory

To develop an alternative conception of communication, a good place to start is by considering what would happen if we allotted the receiver in the conduit model—that is, the audience—a more active role in the communication process. The conduit model assigns the audience the task of unpacking the message and adding it to their mental storehouse. But now let’s give audience members some power: let’s assume they are autonomous (they think and decide for themselves, relatively independent of outside influences) agents (they can make choices and do things that affect the world). Autonomous agency in the conduit model will become most apparent when the audience acts “badly” and interrupts the smooth transmission of information. For example: perhaps the audience refuses delivery of the message, or, on receipt, immediately tosses it in the trash.

These are not unusual ways to treat incoming messages. We do in fact dump junk mail in the basket right by the front door, fast forward through commercials, pay no attention to the flyers on the wall, and so on. Even when we invest attention, we often reject what salespeople, politicians, and pundits say. We even resist messages from those who have our interests at heart—our doctors, family members, or colleagues—when we don’t like what they are telling us.

The conduit model invites us to take the transmission mechanism as just a given, with the main job of communication to be clearing away obstructions to it. To develop a better model of how communication manages to work, even facing an audience of autonomous and perhaps recalcitrant agents, we need to strip away this “given” status. We need to ask: what reasons does an audience have for paying attention at all, and if they pay attention, for trusting the quality of the message someone else is pushing on them?

Speech act theory offers an answer to these questions. In the approach to speech act theory developed by Grice (1957, 1969), extended by Stampe (1967), and applied to public discourse by Kauffeld (1998, 2001a, 2002, 2003, 2009), communication is fundamentally an act: something a communicator does with a reasonable expectation that it will change the world in some way.1 Although we can use communication artifacts to change the physical world—like when we stack books to prop up a shelf—in general, communication does its work by affecting other people. These other people are presumed to be just as much agents as the communicator herself. They will only be willing to be affected by a message if they have good reasons to do so. Thus a key task facing any communicator is to provide her audience such good reasons for accepting her communication—that is, for trusting what she says. And the main way she accomplishes this is by openly taking responsibility for the quality of her message. Here is how it works.

Consider the very basic speech act of saying something. A communicator puts forward a sentence to an audience—for example, “Glucosamine pills help with the pain of knee arthritis.”2 We assume that it’s not given that the audience will trust her. After all, believing is risky for the audience: the communicator could be mistaken or even lying (maybe she’s a shill for a supplement manufacturer). Perhaps the audience has already heard of a study that found glucosamine no better than a placebo. Can they be confident that the communicator has put in the time and effort to verify her statement? Is she lazy, negligent, or careless? In sum, the audience has plenty of good reasons to distrust what the communicator is saying—to resist it, to be recalcitrant.

Notice, however, that it’s not just audience that may be getting into trouble. The communicator is also running a risk. In general, people are responsible for what they do intentionally. When she says something about the health benefits of glucosamine, the communicator intends the audience to believe it. She has thus made herself responsible for that belief; she is blameworthy if that belief is of poor quality, i.e., false. Furthermore, she’s soliciting the audience’s belief openly. If it turns out that glucosamine is ineffective, she won’t be able to avoid criticism for lying or negligence; because she was open about her intention, she can’t really wriggle out with excuses like “I didn’t really mean it—I was just speaking offhand, mentioning something I read online somewhere—I didn’t expect you to take me seriously.” The fact that she is openly seeking belief thus ensures that the audience will be able to hold her responsible if what she says turns out to be wrong.3

Communication thus begins to look like a lose-lose situation: both communicator and audience are running a risk that the exchange will go badly wrong. The audience risks believing something false; the communicator risks being responsible for that false belief. But the communicator’s vulnerability...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction to This Book
• part 1  How Ethics Matters
• part 2  Professional Practice
• part 3  Case Studies
• Afterword
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Footnotes