INFORMATION:
Context in science reporting affects beliefs about, and support for, science
2021-07-06
(Press-News.org) BUFFALO, N.Y. - How the media frame stories about science affects the public's perception about scientific accuracy and reliability, and one particular type of narrative can help ameliorate the harm to science's reputation sometimes caused by different journalistic approaches to scientific storytelling, according to a new study led by a University at Buffalo researcher.
"What our experiment shows is that the way the news media talk about science focuses too much attention on individuals in a way that doesn't accurately describe the way science actually works," says Yotam Ophir, an assistant professor of communication in UB's College of Arts and Sciences and the paper's lead author.
Ophir stresses that the public benefits from reports of scientific errors, but that benefit can be even greater if media coverage of failure includes mention that ongoing scrutiny is one of the hallmarks of the scientific enterprise.
Science is a process. It's not a set of eureka moments and brilliant discoveries. It's about a community of scholars who continuously, skeptically and constructively check each other's work, Ophir points out. And since much of the public's knowledge about science comes from the media, the absence of reporting on the community-based, self-correcting nature of science is worrisome.
"This becomes a problem when science makes mistakes - and science will inevitably make mistakes," says Ophir, an expert on the effect of media content on audiences. "When this happens, the narrative frequently shifts to a description of crisis, a moment that could lead people to lose faith in the reliability of science itself."
He says the media can better communicate the values of science by explaining how identifying and correcting scientific mistakes is evidence of a healthy scientific process. And the key is a new type of story, according to the study's findings published in the journal Public Understanding of Science.
Ophir and co-author Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, call this story "problem explored." Its efficacy for explaining how science works emerged from their online study involving nearly 4,500 participants between the ages of 18 and 81.
To begin, the researchers performed a comprehensive content analysis. They identified that science stories generally fall into three broad categories:
There is the "honorable quest," a story that chronicles a scientific achievement with a hero scientist who has produced reliable and consequential knowledge.
The "counterfeit quest" is a story that initially reports a scientific success later found to be fraudulent, unethical or methodologically flawed.
"Science is broken" relates to issues of replicability, an inherent part of the scientific process through which scientists repeat an experiment to see if their results match those of a previous published experiment. Replicability failures are often framed as evidence that science is broken.
Ophir and Jamieson also introduced, along with a control story unrelated to science, another narrative.
"In this new condition, which we call 'problem explored,' stories of replication failures and those about prominent research that's later found to be wrong remain part of the narrative, but failures are explained to be part of the scientific process," he says.
"We found the scientific failure narratives to be most detrimental to trust in science," says Ophir. "But if you better contextualize a failure story, we found it possible to ameliorate those detrimental effects.
"Contextualizing explains the nature of science. It's this processes of reassessment and re-evaluation that makes science strong."
As an example, Ophir points to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's temporary halting of delivery of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine after reports surfaced of rare clotting events in some patients.
"The vaccine received federal approval, but was then pulled. How do you talk about this without creating distrust in science?" he asks. "The cynical way would be to use the case as evidence that science doesn't work, but that's misleading. What happened is that science worked exactly as it should. Concerns arose after approval; the data was re-examined; and scientists concluded that the risks were minimal and redeployed the vaccine."
The "problem explored" narrative, in addition to putting scientific failures in context, also generates a slipstream that restores some of the lost faith resulting from "science is broken" stories.
That the "problem explored" narrative didn't surface as part of the researchers' content analysis could be due to a number of factors. News directors might question whether such stories are newsworthy. Researchers themselves might be reluctant to share stories of successful replication as opposed to more novel advances.
But it's not just the media, and Ophir says this research is not about finger pointing.
"There is an interaction between sources and journalists," he says. "The 'science is broken' story, which is relatively recent, is something that came from scientists themselves. However well intentioned, the narrative they promoted and the way journalists accepted and framed the stories created indications of scientific unreliability."
Just as Ophir says this study suggests how a contextually framed story can provide insights into a healthy scientific process, the research also speaks to a healthy relationship between scientists and journalists.
"This is not about blame," he says. "I strongly believe that journalists do their best to serve the public. It's our job as scientists to provide them with stories that better contextualize our work."
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Not enough women and minorities apply for a job? Change the recruitment committee
2021-07-06
Amid calls for racial and social justice nationwide, businesses and educational institutions are grappling with how to adopt more inclusive organizational practices, including more diversified hiring. However, recruitment teams and strategic leaders often blame their lack of a diverse workforce on a lack of diverse applicants. A large study of recruitment data suggests a simple and efficient way of increasing diversity in applicant pools: have more diverse recruitment committees and leadership teams.
The study, led by researchers at the University of Houston's Center for ADVANCING ...
Interleukin-6 antagonists improve outcomes in hospitalised COVID-19 patients
2021-07-06
Findings from a study published today [6 July] in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) have prompted new World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations to use interleukin-6 antagonists in patients with severe or critical COVID-19 along with corticosteroids.
A new analysis of 27 randomised trials involving nearly 11,000 patients found that treating hospitalised COVID-19 patients with drugs that block the effects of interleukin-6 (the interleukin-6 antagonists tocilizumab and sarilumab) reduces the risk of death and the need for mechanical ventilation.
The study, which was coordinated by WHO in partnership with King's College London, University of Bristol, University ...
Software tool breathes life into post-COVID office airflow
2021-07-06
ITHACA, N.Y. - As offices nationwide spring back to life, interior space designers and architects will soon have an easy-to-use planning tool to place indoor workplace furniture, staff, partitions and ventilation in a manner that maximizes fresh air flow and reduces the risk of airborne pathogens.
The Cornell Environmental Systems Lab in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning will introduce a new indoor module for their existing Eddy3D software, a professional-level airflow and microclimate simulator that can help improve ventilation.
The new indoor module will be released this summer, while the research supporting it will ...
Keeping bacteria under lock and key
2021-07-06
Scientists and engineers are constantly looking for ways to better our world.
Synthetic biology is an emerging field with promise for improving our ability to manufacture chemicals, develop therapeutic medicines such as biopharmaceuticals and vaccines, and enhance agricultural production, among other things. It relies on taking natural or engineered pieces of DNA and combining them in new ways in biological systems, such as microbes, bacteria or other organisms.
According to University of Delaware's Aditya Kunjapur, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, as these sophisticated microbial technologies are advanced, scientists need to explore ways to keep these organisms from ending up in the wrong environment.
For example, a bacterium that is good at making ...
Fighting COVID with COVID
2021-07-06
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- What if the COVID-19 virus could be used against itself? Researchers at Penn State have designed a proof-of-concept therapeutic that may be able to do just that. The team designed a synthetic defective SARS-CoV-2 virus that is innocuous but interferes with the real virus's growth, potentially causing the extinction of both the disease-causing virus and the synthetic virus.
"In our experiments, we show that the wild-type [disease-causing] SARS-CoV-2 virus actually enables the replication and spread of our synthetic virus, thereby effectively promoting its own decline," said Marco Archetti, associate professor of biology, Penn State. "A version of this synthetic construct could be used as a self-promoting ...
Loss of biodiversity in streams threatens vital biological process
2021-07-06
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The fast-moving decline and extinction of many species of detritivores -- organisms that break down and remove dead plant and animal matter -- may have dire consequences, an international team of scientists suggests in a new study.
The researchers observed a close relationship between detritivore diversity and plant litter decomposition in streams, noting that decomposition was highest in waters with the most species of detritivores -- including aquatic insects such as stoneflies, caddisflies, mayflies and craneflies, and crustaceans such as scuds and freshwater shrimp and crabs.
Decomposition ...
Perceptions of counterfeits among luxury goods differ across cultures
2021-07-06
ABINGTON, Pa. -- Counterfeit dominance decreases Anglo-American, but not Asian, consumers' quality perception and purchase intention of authentic brands, according to a team of researchers.
"Counterfeit dominance is the perception that counterfeit products possess more than 50% of market share," Lei Song, assistant professor of marketing at Penn State Abington, said. "Counterfeit dominance is a phenomenon especially concerning for the luxury fashion industry as counterfeit luxury fashion brands account for 60% to 70% of the $4.5 trillion in total counterfeit trade and one-quarter of total sales in luxury fashion goods."
Lei and his team conducted four behavioral experiments with 149 participants on ...
How racial wage discrimination of football players ended in England
2021-07-06
Increased labour mobility seems to have stopped the racial wage discrimination of black English football players. A new study in economics from Stockholm university and Université Paris-Saclay used data from the English Premier League to investigate the impact of the so-called "Bosman ruling", and found that racial discrimination against English football players disappeared - but not for non-EU players. The study was recently published in the journal European Economic Review.
In 1995, the so-called Bosman ruling turned the labour market for European footballers upside down, introducing a free transfer ...
Patently harmful: Fewer female inventors a problem for women's health
2021-07-06
Necessity is the father of invention, but where is its mother? According to a new study published in Science, fewer women hold biomedical patents, leading to a reduced number of patented technologies designed to address problems affecting women.
While there are well-known biases that limit the number of women in science and technology, the consequences extend beyond the gender gap in the labour market, say researchers from McGill University, Harvard Business School, and the Universidad de Navarra in Barcelona. Demographic inequities in who gets to invent lead to demographic inequities in who benefits from invention.
"Although the percentage of biomedical patents held by women has risen from 6.3% to 16.2% over the last three decades, ...
Communication: A key tool for citizen participation in science
2021-07-06
Researchers from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain) have analysed the way citizen science is practised in Spain. The paper, produced by Carolina Llorente and Gema Revuelta, from UPF's Science, Communication and Society Studies Centre (CCS-UPF) and Mar Carrió, from the University's Health Sciences Educational Research Group (GRECS), has been published in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM).
Based on the study, a series of recommendations have been put forward to improve how citizen participation in science is carried out. Firstly, they suggest efforts be stepped up regarding the training given for assessing these initiatives or the creation of multi-disciplinary teams with a broad range of ...