How to communicate about science ... from a journalist's perspective

Coming from a more journalistic perspective, Chris Mooney (author of The Republican War on Science), recently lamented the poor communication skills of most scientists in an article in Seed Magazine.

"[S]cientists in the US have little practice when it comes to crafting a message or winning a political debate, and their inexperience sometimes leads to ill-advised actions that have the tendency to backfire."

His also reiterated the importance of framing messages and playing toward predispositional interpretive lenses. His recommendations are completely in line with many of our findings (for example, Lee, Scheufele, & Lewenstein, 2005) about how people process scientific information:

"To be sure, most scientists have figured out how to communicate to their classes or to explain their work at dinner parties. But the American public doesn’t have the same level of background knowledge, or the same attention span. It learns in sound bites; in brief snippets at best."

(Read the complete article here.)