What works is work, asserts Tracey Brown

Do you worry that saying something is scientifically wrong will open you up to the charge of arrogance? Is countering scientifically nonsensical policy so unlikely to win votes or plaudits that it only features in your retirement plans? Amidst all the talk about communication, scientific bodies and policy makers seem nervous of making themselves plain – about homeopathy, GM crops, hybrid embryos, the ‘energy gap’. Sometimes I think I’m in danger of losing track of what people officially, as opposed to unofficially, think!

Deficit model

I’m not naïve about vote-winners and promotion-killers, but when it comes to science, why shouldn’t public and private be pretty similar? We hear that there are ‘public acceptance’ issues; countering misleading information ‘is not that simple’ and instead of stating a case straightforwardly, complex engagement plans and communication strategies are needed. That to do otherwise would offend, risk being seen as arrogant or, worse, suggest you think the absence of facts is a problem. You might be construed as an advocate of the ‘Deficit Model’!

The idea that what went wrong in the big rows about vaccines, genetics and food safety was the result of pursuing a deficit model – a belief that tensions arose from lack of knowledge and could be resolved by authoritative information – is debatable.

It was a bit of a caricature, extrapolated from clumsy ideas expressed by some in science policy as setting the public straight. The adoption of anti-deficit-model models owed more to the need for a moment of critical self-reflection in science and policy organisations than to investigative rigour about what really causes or addresses disputes. It touched a raw nerve in bodies externally smarting from hostile debate and internally frustrated with organisational inertia.

New approaches debilitating

However, that useful moment of critical reflection became overblown into a way of operating that has been debilitating. The new approaches it invited only said what didn’t work, and were evasive on what might. It opened the science world to salesmen with smoke-and-mirrors claims for strategies that seem to have delivered little beyond a passionate commitment to jargon. Anything anti-deficit model would do.

In some quarters, people now seem hamstrung by painful etiquettes, struggling to talk about the absence of evidence or understanding in public discussion without actually saying that. The communication theories seem to be long on exhortations and short on substance.

Calling something a new name, adding step changes and paradigm shifts, doesn’t give it content. To illustrate this, pick a policy that you’ve found poorly informed, and see how often the words ‘consultation’, ‘engagement’ and ‘dialogue’ were mentioned during its development. See? Words guarantee nothing. And neither do efforts to flesh them out with over-complicated structures for public engagement.

What works

You know what works? Working at it works. Talented and imaginative people help. And most people only find out their talents and imagination for public engagement when they get stuck in.

Working at it means figuring out how to give people something of the reasoning behind your conclusion; helpful rules of thumb, useful insights. When the organisation I work for, Sense About Science, sets up a group to respond to misconceptions, we begin from all the commentary from the press, television, websites and commentators. We organise it into themes and ask where it goes wrong. Why do untenable claims sound tenable? Let’s try to identify the working knowledge (for example, radiation is a spectrum) and reasoning that could be shared; let’s test it, revise it, work at it more.

It’s hard. It varies with the subject. It would never make a communications business because it’s not sufficiently formulaic. But the results are exciting enough to do it more. 

Pick a policy that you’ve found poorly informed, and see how often the words ‘consultation’, ‘engagement’ and ‘dialogue’ were mentioned during its development. See?

Ditch the models

I used to think I was perhaps philistine in my antipathy to communication models. Experience has brought me to recognise that no model was ever likely to circumvent the difficulties in the science and society debate. That it was seen in terms of competing models was part of the problem.

New and old models share more in common than some like to think, reducing public debate to one professionally formulated schema or another. They all tend to lack inspiration because the practice is dominated by fear of getting it wrong and by avoidance of public exposure. They are devoid of the imagination that arises in the cut and thrust of actual debate.

When more bodies get over that fear, ditch the assumption that the priority of communicating is to cover your back and instead share the tools of scientific reasoning, public life will be so much the richer – and less frightening.

Tracey Brown is the Director of Sense About Science