by Dan Vergano, USA Today, November 5, 2010
In a house in the woods, somewhere far away, perhaps lives someone who doesn't love a good story.
"Deep in our nature" lurks a love of story-telling, wrote the Greek philosopher Aristotle around 350 B.C., the world's first literary critic.
And psychologists and neuroscientists have increasingly backed up ol' Aristotle, looking at story-telling as something fundamentally human. Brain scan studies, for example, show listening to stories lights up more and different areas as children age. Alzheimer's patients loss of the ability to follow stories may be the most debilitating aspect of their dementia.
But despite the narrative neuroscience, some groups of scientists, particularly climate researchers, might want to polish their story-telling skills. Where 97% of active climate scientists agree climate change is a reality and only 52% of the public say they agree, according to an Eos journal survey, something may have gone wrong in how scientists communicate to the public.
"There's a narrative vacuum that needs to be filled," wrote the science writer Keith Kloor last month. One catch is that scientists simply prize facts over stories, as climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, noted last week on the " RealClimate" blog.
So is that the problem?
"Scientists, academics, and politicians on the left, do not do stories very well," says Harvard political scientist Michael Jones, who earlier this year led a Policy Studies Journal report on the use and misuse of narrative in policymaking. "You have to tell a story, though, if you want people to retain information."
Work that Jones did as a graduate student published this year, involved experiments on 1,586 people to show how this plays out in the way people talk about climate science. Each person was randomly treated to one of four opinion articles and answered survey questions about their climate opinions before and after reading the article. Each article discussed a recent report on the U.S. effects of global warming.
One of the four was simply a list of the effects of climate change from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean, and points in between, such as "It is 66% likely that the Great Plains area will experience more severe summer droughts."
The other three options were all identically worded stories, with the same facts as the list, but with the good guys, bad guys and solution for global warming swapped out. The options they looked at:
•"Individualist" story — presented "free competition" as the hero of the story, with "bureaucratic unions" and "the infamous Club of Rome" as the enemy, with a market system as the solution to global warming.
• "Hierarchical" story — presented "scientific expertise" as the hero of the story, with " Ecodefense" and the "infamous Earthfirst!" as the enemy, with nuclear energy as the solution to global warming.
• "Egalitarian" story — presented "equal participation" as the hero of the story, with "the radical Cato Institute" and "selfish politicians" as the enemy, with "community-owned renewable" energy as the solution to global warming.
People were more likely to agree with scientist's views about climate change after reading a story, rather than a list alone, regardless of which one they read.
"But what surprised us was how much the hero mattered," Jones said. People liked the villains less after reading the story, but that didn't affect their views much. Instead, having a hero they liked made them much more favorably disposed towards a solution. "Simple stories with likeable heroes are the most effective, they make people overlook incongruent things in the narrative," Jones says. "Obviously, this has implications across a lot of areas."
The findings don't mean that scientists suddenly need to invent parables to reach the public, he suggests, they just need to do more than just throw out the facts and hope that will do all the work. Instead of simply listing the evidence for climate change in reports, and then hoping people decide from hearing it that climate change is real, the findings suggest that scientists would be better off presenting their results in a narrative targeted to their audience's likes and dislikes.
Libertarians, for example, might better listen to the facts about climate change if business is presented as the hero that can save the day from ill effects of increasing temperatures. Environmentalists want to hear about renewable energy.
Normal folks (that's the hierarchical ones) will listen better if they hear that national security is threatened by a dependence on fossil fuels.
Of course, Jones acknowledges that some portion of people just won't accept the evidence for climate change no matter how it is presented, where about 12% of the population was "dismissive" of climate worries, according to a George Mason University survey released in June. "Some of the opposition to addressing climate change is completely rational," he adds, coming from regions of the country, such as West Virginia, where coal and oil interests would see prices in their industries rise with efforts to account for the environmental costs of the greenhouse gases created by burning fossil fuels.
The results aren't too surprising, says science writer Chris Mooney, who presented an American Academy of Arts & Sciences report, "Do Scientists Understand the Public?" this summer, looking at steps towards smarter public discussion of personal genomes, nuclear waste, energy and other new technologies. "Scientists have started taking steps in this direction," Mooney says, pointing to the National Academy of Sciences working with Hollywood writers. "They just need to take more."
Scientists don't like to hear the story about telling stories, Jones adds. "One of the first places I presented this research was to scientists with the National Weather Service. They hated the idea that you have to tell people a story instead of just giving them 'the facts,' " he says. "But the real question is do you want people to hear you, or not?"
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