Just Tell Me What to Do! THE WARNING LABEL
The next section of this resource is a list of good practices for responsible metaphor use. Our choice to call them good practices, not best practices, is intentional and significant. Talking about efficacy in science communication tends to make it easy to avoid talking about (usually implicit) criteria for what counts as effective, and whether those criteria are reasonable in a given context.
When someone says “effective science communication,” they often mean “communication that convinces people to agree with me” or “communication that convinces people to do what I want them to do.” That definition is sometimes justified; again, context matters! But here are nine reasons why that definition may be unhelpful or unjust:
- Science on its own is often insufficient to inform good courses of action. In practice, decision-making usually needs to account for social, political, and economic factors that lie outside science’s remit. Moreover, science is often inconclusive, and experts don’t always agree. The COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis both provide loads of examples.
- Members of your audience may not share your values, beliefs, and priorities, so that the choices that make sense for you don’t make sense for them in ways that matter to their identities, family structures, and other important elements of their lives and of society.
—> For example, an 18 year-old person following scientific advice to get vaccinated, and who lives with their parents who are committed anti-vaxxers, may have to choose between being vaccinated and continued support from their parents. Even if the general advice is that adults should get vaccinated, this teenager may be significantly better off socially, emotionally, and financially if they don’t.
- You may not have accounted for all of the relevant context, so that when people do what you tell them to do, they do things that don’t make sense, have unintended consequences, or otherwise aren’t what you really wanted.
- You may be wrong, so that if people simply believe that they should do what you say because you’re right, they lose trust in you when your advice is unhelpful.
- You may be wrong, so that telling people to do what you say reduces the likelihood of someone helpfully critiquing you and arriving at better knowledge or better practices faster.
- Science is a process that requires repetition and refinement over time, so you may not want non-scientists to get into the habit of changing their lives in response to every new (often inconclusive and partial) scientific development.
- Respecting and valuing expertise isn’t the same as doing what experts say. Democratic societies rely on individuals making their own judgments, in contrast to following the will of controlling leaders in an authoritarian society.
- Science communication often focuses on individuals, but the relevant decisions in following scientifically supported recommendations may need to happen at an institutional level.
—> For example, recommending that people walk regularly to improve their health may be excellent general advice for able-bodied people (though not necessarily for people who employ wheelchairs or other assistive mobility devices!), but may be impossible for someone who lives in a neighborhood with busy roads and no sidewalks, or for someone who works long daytime hours and doesn’t feel safe walking while it’s dark outside.
- Heterogeneity is more resilient than homogeneity.
A better definition of efficacy—more just, more justified, more useful than simply convincing people to agree with you and/or do what you say—is often enabling mutual understanding and conversation. Precisely because science doesn’t have all the answers, establishing good courses of collective action requires conversations involving many perspectives and many ways of knowing. Meanwhile, establishing good individual courses of action requires individuals to engage in dialogic reasoning, putting what they read or hear into conversation with other personal and context-specific knowledge, so that they can make informed choices in context.
Rhetorician Charles Bazerman called this the rhetoric of taking into account. If you don’t share the same values, knowledges, and beliefs as your audience, you may not have the right to persuade them, or be confident that persuading them is a good idea. Instead, your goal may be to share what you know so that they can take it into account.
All of which is to say: context matters. Responsible communication should be response-able: to listen and respond to contextual factors. Careful communication should be care-full: to start and end with trying to care for the people and relationships that matter in that context.