Assessing what to address in science communication
Assessing what to address in science communication
复制标题
DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1212729110
复制
发表时间：
2013-08-20
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Bostrom, Ann
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
de Bruin, Waendi Bruine;Bostrom, Ann
作为民主社会的一员，个人面临着是否支持气候变化减缓、疫苗接种、转基因食品、纳米技术、地球工程等复杂的决定。为了告知人们的决定和公众辩论，政府机构、非政府组织和其他组织的科学专家旨在提供可理解的和科学准确的传播材料。这种交流旨在提高人们对决策相关问题的理解，并在必要时促进行为改变。不幸的是，当科学专家缺乏有关人们需要了解什么才能做出更明智的决定或人们使用什么措辞来描述相关概念的信息时，现有的沟通有时会失败。我们为科学专家提供了一个关于如何使用心理模型研究的介绍，以告知他们的沟通努力。具体来说，我们描述了如何进行采访，以表征人们的决策相关的信念或正在考虑的主题的心理模型，确定他们的知识差距和误解，并揭示他们的首选措辞。我们还描述了设计后续调查的方法，更大的样本，以检查信念的流行程度以及信念与行为的关系。最后，我们讨论了如何从这些采访和调查的结果可以用来设计通信，有效地解决人们的思维模式的措辞，他们理解的差距和误解。我们目前的应用程序到不同的科学领域，表明这种方法导致通信，提高收件人的理解和能力，作出明智的决定。
As members of a democratic society, individuals face complex decisions about whether to support climate change mitigation, vaccinations, genetically modified food, nanotechnology, geoengineering, and so on. To inform people's decisions and public debate, scientific experts at government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and other organizations aim to provide understandable and scientifically accurate communication materials. Such communications aim to improve people's understanding of the decision-relevant issues, and if needed, promote behavior change. Unfortunately, existing communications sometimes fail when scientific experts lack information about what people need to know to make more informed decisions or what wording people use to describe relevant concepts. We provide an introduction for scientific experts about how to use mental models research with intended audience members to inform their communication efforts. Specifically, we describe how to conduct interviews to characterize people's decision-relevant beliefs or mental models of the topic under consideration, identify gaps and misconceptions in their knowledge, and reveal their preferred wording. We also describe methods for designing follow-up surveys with larger samples to examine the prevalence of beliefs as well as the relationships of beliefs with behaviors. Finally, we discuss how findings from these interviews and surveys can be used to design communications that effectively address gaps and misconceptions in people's mental models in wording that they understand. We present applications to different scientific domains, showing that this approach leads to communications that improve recipients' understanding and ability to make informed decisions.