The Environment Agency is trying to understand where members of the public are coming from, so that its efforts to encourage them to prepare for floods will be more productive (cover story). As well as where they live, it’s how they think that concerns the Agency, whose staff is being versed in psychological profiling. Different people react differently to the Agency’s information, depending on their psychology. Training members of staff to spot various patterns of responses enables them to engage with people effectively. This gives a better chance of persuading those at risk to take action.

Starting with people is a theme that recurs throughout this issue of SPA.

Staying with flooding, Sarah Whatmore, Catharina Landström and Sue Bradley are working with local people, as well as natural and social scientists, to predict the extent of flooding. They have discovered that flood maps are not reliable, and that people with local knowledge, gained through living near the river, can contribute information to make computer models more accurate. ‘Local residents are usually presented with the finished products of modelling as options to choose from,’ they say. ‘Rarely do they have the opportunity to influence the questions which informed the modelling in the first place.’

Working in Leicester, Karen Lord has discovered that British Asians deal differently with a diagnosis of cancer than British Whites. British Asian patients are more likely to disbelieve their diagnosis than British White patients. In contrast to White patients, Asian patients would prefer to receive the cancer diagnosis from their GP rather than the hospital consultant. Karen Lord is going on to explore the concepts of trust, distress and denial, to see if they might help explain the difference. ‘Without this knowledge’, she says, ‘the design of our cancer services… remains imperfect. We risk perpetuating the present racial inequalities.’

All these projects are examples of taking people into account in research. It is generally agreed amongst science communicators that this should happen early. Two pieces in this issue comment on this idea of ‘upstream dialogue’: 

While Tee Rogers-Hayden and Nick Pidgeon see upstream dialogue as an important innovation, they maintain that it should not be used to create a new deficit model (in which public opposition to science is laid at the door of a deficient public). They warn that objections to new technologies could be blamed on a lack of early public engagement, rather than, as previously, on a lack of public understanding of science.
 
Commenting on the launch of the Public Attitudes to Science 2008 survey (for a summary of the survey itself, see Enthusiasm, concern and confusion article), Kevin Burchell observes that the upstream model has by no means supplanted the deficit model. He concludes that technological projects ‘need to be “officially” and publicly discussed in all their political, economic and epistemological messiness, rather than as tidy scientifically or medically obvious truths.’

If disentangling the various models of science communication does not kill us, global warming very well may. On the coat-tails of current prophets of doom, philosophers Anthony O’Hear and Simon Blackburn imagine a world in which humans have become extinct. Would it matter? They disagree.

And in to-and-fro disagreement, the SPATalk debates whether researchers should welcome or avoid public engagement. 

Wendy Barnaby, Editor

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