22. Co-Creating Public Trust in Science through Responsive Science Communication
Andrey Kozhanov, Higher School Of Economics, Moscow; Konstantin Fursov, The Polytechnic Museum, Moscow, Russia
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
Trust is a complex term which definition and meaning vary by academic discipline and context.
Being a part of communication process (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), trust is somehow built in wider social interaction that involve risk-taking and uncertainty about future interactions (Resnick, 2011) and decision making (Rahn & Transue, 1998). Public trust in science in turn goes beyond reliability of verified theories or scientific method (Oreskes, 2021) and relates to a wider social context, i.e., to ‘willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of the designers, creators, and operators of science on the expectation that they will behave in a way beneficial to the public’ (Roberts et al., 2013).
Together with the changing images of objectivity (Daston & Galison, 2007) the ways science communicate to public has also transformed from so called ‘deficit’ model aiming at educating population to engagement of people in learning and research issues (Bucchi, 2008). However, practice of public engagement in science is moving slower than expected (Claessens, 2012). Meanwhile, a comparative meta-analysis of empirical studies on public perception of science demonstrated some contradictions concerning people’s knowledge about science and attitudes to it. Though, there is a small positive correlation between general scientific literacy and attitude towards science (Allum et al., 2008), some studies have shown that higher levels of science knowledge may indicate both highly positive and highly negative attitudes towards specific topics on the scientific edge (Durant, et al., 1992). National studies (see Bauer et al., 2012) have shown that public perception of science depends on many factors and demonstrate certain ambivalence – trust in science goes hand by hand with skepticism about it. For Russia the latter is the case as the population of the country demonstrate both relatively low level of knowledge about science (Borissova, 2018) and lower share of the population that approves of scientific and technological progress (Fursov, Nefedova, 2016). All of these requires search for new forms of dialogue between science and society with a stronger focus on engagement as a key to the communicative effectiveness of science (Kim, 2012).
Search for such a key to effective science communication is supposed to get started with understanding how scientific knowledge today is produced. Despite institutional character of science, the process of knowledge production has moved beyond institutions (universities, laboratories, research institutes, etc.), both because of the multiplicity and diversity of places where it takes place and because of the increasing complexity and interdisciplinarity of the tasks involved. Finding answers to the current research questions requires coordination of multiple actors with a wide range of competencies and expertise. Finally, the spread of new technologies makes scientific knowledge itself, including the ways of (co)producing it, more accessible. Open databases, tools for registering participants and observations, platform solutions for collecting ideas and funds, coding workbooks – all of these help the implementation of large-scale research projects, where the involvement of a wide range of people can no longer depend only on the speed of the result, but also its quality. Taken together, these factors open new spaces and practices in science, one of which is the involvement of nonprofessional audiences in the production of “certified” knowledge.
