Professor Laurence Hurst
Image Courtesy of Laurence Hurst
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Laurence: So we realised that through Covid there was an unusual experiment going on in the sense that there was unprecedented level of science engagement. People were getting to know terms like PCR, RNA vaccines, all this sort of stuff. And we were very interested to know, with this unprecedented reach of science into the public domain, is this having any effects on people's receptivity towards Genetics?
Laurence: So we very much treated it as a rather brilliant natural experiment, I guess... Horrible to say!
Sally: There have to be some good things coming out of the pandemic!
Laurence: And some most impressive things came out of the survey! I think the take home within the field of science communication as a whole it's well known that it's near impossible to change people's attitudes.
Laurence: And one of the things that the survey discovered, which I think was really quite striking, was that trust in scientists had not simply gone up. But it had gone up over 30%. 30% of the population said they increased their trust in science.
Sally: So before we go too much in depth about the results, I first want to find out how you did it. Because as a professional science communicator myself, it's certainly the case that I am able to use words like DNA and RNA to a much wider group of people than I would normally do beforehand, just because everyone's talking about it.
Sally: So it's really nice to get some quantitative data on whether it really is true that those terms are more understood. So who was it that you surveyed? How did you reach these people?
Laurence: So that's a really good question because you could imagine just setting up a Survey Monkey and getting people to answer it.
Laurence: Now there's a huge problem with that is that you're not pulling out a random sample of the population. And so it's much better to go through a company. We selected one called Kantar Public, and they have a set of people pre-registered to undertake such surveys, they get paid a small amount to do it. And they could also make sure that the representation of these individuals was as random and as representative, both at the same time.
Laurence: And so from what we can see, the demographics of who answered this very much match the demographics of the UK public at large.
Sally: So we're talking men and women we're talking age.
Laurence: Well, age is a slightly awkward one because we're only allowed to do this with over eighteens. But beyond over eighteens, yes, it looks very representative, gender representative, political ideologies we had seemed to be pretty representative as well, so it's an excellent way of sampling.
Sally: And how many people did you manage to reach?
Laurence: They reached a little over 2000.
Sally: So to begin with it was kind of looking at how much does the public understand about Genetics. And how has all of this news reporting increased during the pandemic, how much has that increase the absolute level of understanding. So from all of the survey results, how much does the public understand about Genetics?
Laurence: It looks to be really pretty good. So we asked a bunch of factual questions you might say. One of the striking results is that people do now, for example, understand PCR. And again, that's a really interesting one because that's something that was not on the radar, I don't think publicly.
Laurence: But at the same time, one of the most striking things is we think we have met the limit of public communication because 30% said they'd never heard the term.
Sally: Do you think that those people might have heard the term and not remembered it when it comes to answering the questionnaire or just somehow got through the pandemic without hearing about PCR tests?
Laurence: We're inclined to think that to some extent it's simply not hearing. And we do find that those who report that they don't know about it also don't seem to be engaged with science. So we ask questions about their engagement with science. They're not reading newspapers to pick up science, they're not listening to the radio, et cetera, et cetera.
Laurence: So they're just simply, you know, there's a body of population out there who aren't engaged with science, and you can do your science communication as much as you like, and I don't think you'll be able to reach them.
Sally: And that's 30% you said?
Laurence: Yeah. So we think because of the saturation coverage that PCR had, that if after all that coverage and you know, your average science engagement could not possibly afford the amount of publicity that PCR has had during the pandemic!
Sally: Right! We're talking Prime Minister's addresses, BBC One prime time. It cannot get bigger.
Laurence: It cannot get bigger. There's absolutely no way it could be bigger than this. That 30% still say they don't know about it. Then I think that's probably, we are getting close to the limits of where science communication can go.
Laurence: So at the best when we do science communication, we're talking to 70% of the population. Most of the time we're probably talking to much, much less than 70% of the population.
Sally: So you found that about two thirds of people had a positive attitude towards Genetics. I think it's pretty good considering that Genetics, as you say, is the field with stem cell technology, genetic modification and things like that. Where did you find that people are getting their Genetics information from and who are they trusting to get this information from?
Laurence: So if you remember back, we had those sort of daily broadcasts from NHS spokesmen, governmental scientists, some university scientists, and the politicians themselves.
Sally: Good old "Next slide please."
Laurence: Yes,"Next slide please."
Laurence: It's most intriguing that actually university academics come out top, quite easily top. About over 80% really trusted university academics. The NHS spokesmen were trusted pretty well. The governmental scientific spokesmen were trusted very well. The government was not.
Laurence: And the lowest on the list was rather interestingly, celebrities. Less than 1% say they trusted information from celebrities.
Laurence: So it sort of fits the model is if I think that you know what you are talking about, I will trust you and I think you haven't got any conflicts of interest, et cetera, et cetera.
Laurence: There wasn't much trust in not-for-profits. I suspect they were thought to be possibly too much in the game, so to speak. But it has an interesting corollary, which we note in the paper that if you are doing science engagement, you're actually better off not coming from "The Genetics Society" because then you'd be seen to have a conflict of interest potentially and you might be pushing something. But you're much better off badging yourself as you know, "I'm a university academic and this is what I study," and then, you will be trusted.
Sally: Now I want to move on to your PLOS Biology paper because, oh my goodness, I admit that I am biased as a professional science communicator, but in this paper, you are really looking at who is it that has strong feelings in support of science, who is it that has strong feelings against science. And how does their factual understanding of science change that? So can you describe why you set up the questions?
Laurence: So let me give you a little bit of the historical background, which I think is actually quite important to notice here.
Laurence: So, through the eighties and nineties, the modus operandi for science communication ran under what's called the deficit model. This presumes that if you want to change people attitude, you change information. So if you want to make people more positive towards GM, explain the science.
Sally: If they don't like it, it's clearly because they just don't understand it, you know!
Laurence: That's the underlying premise of the deficit model, and that's supported by much survey work. And in fact, our survey reports the same correlation, but we think it's not caused it. And that is that the people who are more approving of science typically know more. Just simple, factual textbook knowledge questions like: plants are the major source of oxygen in the atmosphere. Is that true or false? Blah, blah, blah. And another one was only GM tomatoes have genes. Not true.
Laurence: And so we had just straightforward factual questions. Now when you look at those historically, there's a hundreds of surveys have been done like this, you do in fact find this correlation that the folks who are more negative tend to know less, and it's been mooted that that may be because if you don't understand the science, maybe you were more fearful of it.
Laurence: Therefore, the logic was, okay, tell people the science and you should now increase trust. And as an enterprise, that has been an unmitigated failure. In many cases, it makes it worse. In many cases, it has no effect. And there's very, very little evidence that actually telling people science changes their attitude.
Laurence: So in the last five years, another idea has come along and that idea was people started looking at the most negative, the people most negative towards science. And what they found was that in a number of disciplines, so for the GM question, for the vaccine question - it was particular MMR - that they found that there was a regularity, which was that when you look at their textbook knowledge, it wasn't very high. That's as we saw before. But what was high is what they thought they understood. So their self-confidence in their understanding was high.
Laurence: So what motivated this paper was to ask if that's much, much more general an effect. First, can we replicate those? Yes, we could replicate that effect.
Laurence: But we're also interested in what's going on at the other end. That's to say the people who are strongly accepting of science, are they also really confident in their understanding of science? And is it actually the case that the people who don't hold strong opinions, about science, actually just sort of know that they don't really know. That's a very different model to the classical deficit model where people who don't know should be the most fearful. This is if you don't know, you are rather neutral.
Laurence: And the key result of the papers across all of these questions that we asked was that the strength of attitude was very well predicted by self-confidence about science. So people who were very supportive of science believed they understood the science.
Laurence: People who were very negative towards science believed that they understood the science. And the neutrals were sitting there going, I know I don't understand the science. So we think this actually makes some sort of sense. You can't really sustain a strong attitude unless you believe that you really do understand things.
Laurence: So it's actually quite a flip around from the deficit model.
Sally: So if we were to put this in the context of say, vaccination, we are saying that the people who are really strongly against being vaccinated and the people who are really strongly for being vaccinated, both believe that they know an awful lot about the science of vaccination.
Laurence: Absolutely.
Sally: But it so happens that if you were to actually give them a quiz on the science of vaccination, the people who are against it will do worse in their scientific knowledge, whereas the people who are for vaccines would do better in their scientific knowledge.
Laurence: Yes, and that's the thing that we label the objective-subjective deficit.
Laurence: So the idea is that you have an objective amount of knowledge and you have a subjective view of your knowledge, and there seems to be a bit of a gap with those. And when the gap is in a particular direction, they tend to be more negative.
Laurence: So there are a number of the fact questions that were particularly revealing, particularly predictive, I should say, and those were the one about whether only GM crops had genes. The negative folks tended to think that only the GM crops had genes. They tended to believe that only humans were the source of all radioactivity. So you can't get it from rocks. And they tend to believe that you could pick up genes into your own system from eating GM crops.
Sally: There is a logic to that.
Laurence: Oh yes!
Sally: If you think that only genetically modified foods have genes, and that by eating genes you will get them in your own genome. It is completely logical to think therefore, GM food would be bad.
Laurence: No, absolutely. This is, I think, actually a really important point to make. Because lots of people have suggested that what we might be picking up is a so-called Dunning-Kruger effect. And in the Dunning-Kruger effect, the idea is that some people don't have the logical rational skills to be able to know that they don't have the logical rational skills.
Laurence: What we think is going on, what we argue in the paper, it's not definitive, but the fact that those questions stood out - you're absolutely right, if you think that only GM tomatoes of genes, then you can see that's a bit like a pesticide. So it's a perfectly logical inference. It just happens to be a logical inference of incorrect information.
Laurence: I don't think it's necessarily Dunning-Kruger. I think it's a logical inference from incorrect information.
Sally: And in absolute terms, if they've got a negative view, what is their level of science understanding and comprehension?
Laurence: So as it happens for two of the questions that we asked: do you trust scientists to operate for the public good, do you think scientific claims are exaggerated? For those two, it was only 1-2% of the population who sit in this very negative class, but they very clearly had high self-confidence, as high a self-confidence as those who were strongly supportive, but very clearly the factual knowledge questions were on the average substantially lower.
Laurence: And in fact, for one of the questions I can give us the hype question. The average factual knowledge was in fact the lowest in those who were most opposed. It's not just low, it's actually low-est.
Sally: And as a group of people, because we're talking about making sure that the demographics of the overall survey was quite balanced, are you able to say certain demographics of people are more likely to fall into this category?
Laurence: Yes, important question. So we asked four questions about GM, about vaccines, about exaggeration, about trust, and what we see is that for the most part, there is only really one regularity defining the negatives. And that is that they believe they understand the science, but they don't.
Laurence: The demographics for those four questions turn out to be rather different. So for the hype and trust questions, we pick up a weak, and I emphasise it's weak, effect of degree of educational attainment, religiosity. And I think in the trust question, there may be slight tendencies towards being slightly more right-wing, but actually the politics for the most part was largely irrelevant.
Laurence: No obvious effective age. For the GM, there was an effect of age, older individuals were more likely to be anti-GM . For the vaccine question, it was quite the opposite.
Laurence: So when you look at it en masse, there is no simple demographic to say, "Ah, yes, you are one of those, you are a right-wing, religious, whatever, old person, and therefore..." No, it just doesn't work like that as far as we can see, the demographics are highly variable.
Sally: Going back to earlier in this conversation, we're saying that about 30% of the population, science communication just isn't reaching them. Do you think that this 1 to 2% of the population who are strongly against science are within that group who aren't receiving too much science information, or would you say they're more in that middle range of the spectrum?
Laurence: No so we can also ask another question: which sources do you trust for information? And it turns out that there's quite an enrichment of the "None of the above do I trust" within those most negative. So it's as though they're functioning as you know, "I'll discover the science for myself", which is actually an excellent attitude to have I think, really get into it. But if you're not going to trust anybody to provide that information, maybe there is an issue there.
Laurence: So I think what one of the things we can say is that we've got nice evidence that increase in trust is indeed predictive of whether people will take the vaccine.
Laurence: There is some interesting information also coming out from the science communication literature, which suggests that actually explaining evidence isn't necessarily useful. This is one of the most soul destroying things I think for a scientist!
Sally: This is exactly where I was gonna move onto, is this backfire effect? Because one thing I notice is that a lot of science communication professionals might not use the evidence that is out there about the most effective forms of science communication in their own practice because, ah, it's so easy to think "If I tell people the facts, that's all they need."
Laurence: That's what we do. That's what we revert to. We revert to a null mode. I'm gonna tell you the facts.
Sally: Yes if I want people to increase their understanding of, say Genetics, I'll tell them more facts about Genetics.
Sally: But here you've identified a group of people who think that they already have a high level of understanding. How on earth can you reach people who think they already know it all, but have it wrong without causing this backfire effect, which I'm sure you can explain better than I can, but I understand as: if you tell someone they're wrong, it's like they're being attacked. It's like, "No, I know my way. You've got your facts, but you saying that this thing is different actually solidifies my own beliefs even if those beliefs are wrong!"
Laurence: There is quite a move I have to say to think that what we're not doing is addressing what you might call the silent majority.
Laurence: So we do have this great focus on this, as I said in our survey is 1-2%, for the anti-GM question, it was 5%. That's the minority, and to some extent it might be very, very hard to talk to individuals who believe that they're experts but don't know very much.
Laurence: So I think there's quite a move afoot. Say, okay, we can't reach them. But there's this other large population, and in fact, one of the most striking things that came out of our survey is we ask them, did they want to hear more about science? Is they're about enough or did they think there was too much? Over 40%, very nearly 50% said they wanted to hear more science.
Laurence: And one of the big takes is we're at an unusual position now. The trust in Genetics, the trust in science has gone up because of the pandemic. People want to hear more about science, but I think these debates tend then to focus on this 1-2% most negative. I think we should be thinking much more about how can we address the 98% who are actually much more open.
Laurence: Now I know, some of those we're never going to get to as we've seen from the PCR, we think we found some sort of limit.
Laurence: But that probably means the 70% of the population out there, many of which want to hear more about science, many of which are really open to it. And Covid has opened their eyes, and increased their trust in what we are saying. So, and this extent of increase in trust, I can't emphasise it off, is absolutely exceptional. We've never seen anything like this before!
Laurence: When it comes to science communication, actually we're making some progress on how to communicate consensus science. And it turns out, telling people the evidence doesn't help very much, but telling people what the consensus is really does.
Laurence: So if you're talking about consensus science, often the best thing to do is start by saying: 97% of climate change scientists agree. That statement in and of itself seems to psychologically unlock doors for many people going, okay, if I'm going to object to this, what do I know that's superior to these climate change scientists who really have studied it. And you might have noticed, do you remember those old cat food adverts? Eight out of ten owners said their cats approved.
Sally: Oh it's always nine out of ten dentists! I want to know what that one dentist does because it's always nine out of ten dentists!
Laurence: Yes. So this is the communication strategy for consensus science, which is very much emerging at the moment, which is very much focused on what the consensus is.
Laurence: And it does seem to be that there's this sort of gateway effect of just telling people that the majority opinion, the strong majority opinion, amongst scientists is that this is real.
Sally: Do you think that's because we're a social species, so we just want to believe what everyone else believes? We don't want to be the odd one out.
Laurence: There is evidence, particularly in school kids, that individuals like to adopt the dominant attitudes of those around them. In a sense, majority verdicts end up being contagious. That's all well and good for consensus science. The challenge in something like covid is different because the science was rapidly moving.
Laurence: We can't say "No we absolutely know," because we absolutely did not know many things. But I think the science communicators actually for the most part did exactly the right thing for which there's some good evidence, which is you tell people what we do know. You tell people what we don't know. And you tell people what we're going to do to address the don't knows.
Laurence: And by doing that, clearly, I mean our evidence would suggest that that has been, at least within the UK, a successful strategy in so much as people's trust really has gone up.
Sally: I kind of wanna think about what all of your findings as a whole means for people. So to start off with what it means for media and journalists in terms of addressing the public. Because one line from your paper talking about seeking out balanced views: the journalists should not mistake confidence with competence.
Laurence: Yes. This, I think is absolutely right. If you look at many of the polemicists, the Alex Jones-es of this world, for example, by which I don't mean the woman who's on The One Show, I mean the American who's being sued, left, right, and center.
Laurence: What they do is they very deliberately come over as extraordinarily confident. So one of the things that we get here is confidence is a predictor of extreme negative or extreme positive viewpoints, but is not necessarily a good predictor of competence within the subject itself. So yes, I think it, it does behove the folks like the BBC to make sure that when they're having people on that not only do they speak with confidence, but they speak with authority and they know of what they speak.
Sally: If you are an academic, a researcher, someone in the field of Genetics, how would you take the findings of your research here and apply that so that we can not just be telling people the facts as we were discussing before? How do you think that those people should share their science in a way that's most effective based on your findings?
Laurence: So this isn't our research, but these tricks of relating, first up, what the consensus is seems to be very helpful. There's actually some evidence that relating evidence is actually destructive because for every bit of evidence, somebody clever will find a bit of counter-evidence. So for consensus science, telling people consensus.
Laurence: Building trust is never going to be too, too bad a thing. Even this study, which showed the building trust, had an effect on the vaccine update. They still concluded that in the long term, it's probably better that you are open, and you do build trust so the next time you know you can be a trusted voice. So gaining trust and part of gaining trust, I think was, now this is for uncertain science to be upfront, about what we do know, what we don't know, and what we're doing to find out about it.
Laurence: So I think it depends upon whether you are talking about really accepted science that you're trying to communicate. Or right at the cutting-edge where we really don't know, and trying to apply the line "No, no, we really do know this," it's not gonna help because when it turns out that you didn't know it, you are a bad spokesman. Trust overall in science would go down...
Sally: And as you said at the start, highlighting that you're from a university as opposed to from a society. That's such a tiny little change that people can make.
Laurence: It turns out to be a tiny but very powerful change. If you are seen as being at all, possibly partial, your trust calculation goes down straight away
Sally: As a person who's not a researcher, not an academic, but is trying to change the mind of maybe a family member who doesn't want to get the vaccine, or you are sat down for Sunday lunch and suddenly a topic about GM comes up. For those people, how can we best change minds?
Laurence: Okay, so one thing we know that won't change minds is to take them on straight-up. Force them to defend their attitude. As soon as you do that, we know from lots of experimental evidence, that just put simply puts them in the corner, backs-them up and they become more defensive and so brains shut down at that point.
Laurence: So there are a number of strategies that appear to be quite helpful.
Laurence: Here we are talking about vaccine hesitant, not vaccine deniers. I might add, these are two different kettles of fish. The vaccine hesitants are simply that they're vaccine hesitant, and can be convinced. Vaccine deniers, this is conspiracy theory and as far as I'm aware, no one's found a mass method to get around conspiracy theories because every conspiracy theory has as a last recourse: "You would be telling me that, wouldn't you? Because you are an expert."
Laurence: But if you wanna have a conversation with vaccine hesitant people, then quietly listen to what their concerns are, rather than putting them into a corner. And it's perfectly valid to ask, you know, what are your concerns? What would address those concerns? And listen and ask, and don't tell.
Sally: That's easier said than done.
Laurence: It is, yes! In many regards it's just normal human communication. I mean, how would you feel if somebody tried to batter you over the head with a particular set of opinions telling you that these are the opinions that you ought to have.
Laurence: So I think try and put yourself in their position. Why are they being hesitant? What are the fears that they have here? It is not uncommon that human brains look at the risks much more than they see the benefits. Human brains are really bad at this tiny risk compared to this massive benefit.
Laurence: Particularly, there's a temporal aspect as well, because there's some evidence that a tiny risk now measures more on people's brains than the possible benefits in the future. The real difficulty with communicating with human brains is we suck up risks and we suck up dangers. So some people have suggested you play with that and you go, well, what the downsides would be of not having the vaccine. What are the risks of that? And so you are balancing two sets of risks. Now which one is the more important one?
Sally: And finally, what do you think is the most important thing to come out of this research?
Laurence: Well, the most original thing is no one had noticed before that extreme self-confidence is found at both ends of the distribution.
Laurence: So extreme self-confidence is found, but not warranted for the most part, for those who are objecting to science. But it's also found amongst those who are highly in favour of science and the neutrals are, they know they don't know. And that's actually an important contribution I would hope at least to this debate.
Laurence: Because no one's ever not really asked about the natural history of the people who accept science. And the people who accept science, for the most part, they seem to know science and they seem to accept it possibly because they know it.
Laurence: In the very biggest perspective, I think the world faces a serious dilemma. And that serious dilemma is we can't talk meaningfully to each other.
Laurence: And for something like climate change, for example, where this is an impending threats to humanity, if we can't communicate clearly such that people actually understand the science and understand how serious these things are, then we're in a problem. And this is a fundamental question about science communication, and we desperately need to know, and I mean desperately, we need to do this fast, to know how do we properly communicate science potentially to audiences that are skeptical of the science.
