Knowledge communication (I)

Dr. Sing-Hang Cheung

HKU Psychology
singhang@hku.hk
Outline
o What is science communication?
o Why is it important to communicate science?
o How to communicate science effectively?
o Going backward … before science communication

2 Knowledge communication (I)

What is science communication?
What do you know about science communication?

Your response

www.menti.com

4679 6596

3 Knowledge communication (I) Image source: https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/from-the-staff/8-myths-about-public-understanding-of-science

 People worldwide display an incredible appetite of
scientific information … The public want to know,
they want to understand.
Stephen Hawking

4 Knowledge communication (I) https://phys.org/news/2015-12-stephen-hawking-medal-science.html

 What is science communication?

Science communication (SciCom) is defined as the use of appropriate

skills, media, activities, and dialogue to produce one or more of the
following personal responses to science (the AEIOU vowel analogy):
Awareness, Enjoyment, Interest, Opinion-forming, and Understanding.
(Burns, O’Connor & Stocklmayer, 2003, p. 183)

5 Knowledge in social sciences

AEIOU public responses
• Scientists aim to achieve AEIOU in the public through science
communication.
• Awareness, including familiarity with new aspects of science
• Enjoyment or other affective responses, e.g. appreciating science as
entertainment or art
• Interest, as evidenced by voluntary involvement with science or its
communication
• Opinions, the forming, reforming, or confirming of science-related attitudes
• Understanding of science, its content, processes, and social factors

6 Knowledge communication (I) (Burns, O’Connor & Stocklmayer, 2003, p. 191)

Three types of awareness
• We aim to raise the awareness of three different types of people.
• Uninformed—the lay public
• “who don’t know what they don’t know”
• Informed—the interested public
• “who know what they don’t know” AI learns to generate
• Specialists—the attentive public 3D shapes

• they “know”

7 Knowledge communication (I) (Burns, O’Connor & Stocklmayer, 2003)

Enjoy science
• Enjoyment of science can come at two levels.
• A superficial level—science as entertainment or art
• A deeper level—science as participation in discovery and exploration
Science x Play Science as participation

https://oxford.emory.edu/news/2019/02/science-festival.html https://www.vanderbilt.edu/datascience/data-science-for-social-good/
8 Knowledge communication (I) (Burns, O’Connor & Stocklmayer, 2003)
Interest in science
• Do people want to learn from scientists?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/12/key-findings-about-americans-confidence-in-science-and-their-views-on-scientists-role-in-society/
https://wellcome.org/reports/wellcome-global-monitor-covid-19/2020
9 Knowledge communication (I)
Opinion development and change
• Dissatisfaction with existing Alsop’s informal conceptual change model
knowledge may result in
challenges to one’s opinion.
(cognition)
• Challenges to one’s beliefs
may also lead to changes in
opinion. (affection)
• One’s desire to maintain
control of the situation
may also lead to changes in
opinion. (conation)

10 Knowledge communication (I) (Alsop, 1999; Burns, O’Connor & Stocklmayer, 2003)
Understanding of science
• Scientists should communicate with the public to increase understanding
of science.

What are the applications of science?

What are the implications of science?

11 Knowledge communication (I) (Burns, O’Connor & Stocklmayer, 2003; Ripple, Meijaard & Newsome, 2018)
 What is science communication?

12 Knowledge in social sciences (Burns, O’Connor & Stocklmayer, 2003, p. 191)

COVID-19—fact or myth?
TRUE or FALSE?

Your response

www.menti.com

4679 6596

https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/covid-19-myth-or-fact
13 Knowledge communication (I) https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/2019-novel-coronavirus-myth-versus-fact
Statistics from 2020
• Ipsos interviewed 2254 people (aged 16–75 years) in the UK in May 2020.

14 Knowledge communication (I) https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/belief-among-britons-coronavirus-myths

Statistics from 2020
• Another study on misinformation beliefs about COVID was conducted in
Australia.

15 Knowledge communication (I) (Pickles et al., 2021)

 What is an infodemic?

An infodemic is too much information including false or misleading

information in digital and physical environments during a disease
outbreak. It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviours that can
harm health.
World Health Organization

16 Knowledge in social sciences https://www.who.int/health-topics/infodemic

Global COVID-related infodemic
• COVID-19 rumors, stigma and conspiracy theories existed everywhere in
the world.

17 Knowledge communication (I) (Islam et al., 2020)

 Why is science communication important?

Effective science communications inform people about the benefits,

risks, and other costs of their decisions, thereby allowing them to
make sound choices. … The goal of science communication is not
agreement, but fewer, better disagreements
Baruch Fischhoff

18 Knowledge in social sciences (Fischhoff, 2013)

How do you gather information?
How often do you use different media to retrieve information?

Your response

www.menti.com

4679 6596

19 Knowledge communication (I) Image source: http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/internet/difference-between-social-media-and-digital-marketing/

The age of social media

20 Knowledge communication (I) Image source: https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media

The generation of social media

21 Knowledge communication (I) Image source: https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media

Misinformation on social media
• While social media provides a convenient platform for information sharing,
it can also be a channel for the propagation of misinformation.
• How bad is it?

22 Knowledge communication (I) Image source: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52157202

COVID infodemic
• What percentage of YouTube videos were misleading?
• Li et al. (2020) analyzed 69 top viewed YouTube videos.
• Total view count was 257,804,146.

23 Knowledge communication (I) (Li et al., 2020)

COVID-19 myth-busting
• Can science communication help?

24 Knowledge communication (I) (Challenger, Summer & Bott, 2022)

SciCom as intervention
• Myth agreement rating dropped after the intervention.

25 Knowledge communication (I) (Challenger, Summer & Bott, 2022)

 Science communication can make a difference

Inevitably, scientists or science communicators need to increase the

presence of factual information in social media platform on which
people often rely nowadays.
At times, the target audience may already have a biased view because
of the misleading information they had received from the social
media.

26 Knowledge in social sciences

From test tubes to YouTube
• We started assuming scientists having “some” consensus on a topic.
Scientific consensus

27 Knowledge communication (I) (Allchin, 2023)

Publish to build consensus

28 Knowledge communication (I) Image source: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/as-good-as-it-gets-peer-review-and-its-discontents/

Checkpoint #1: the editor

29 Knowledge communication (I) Image source: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/as-good-as-it-gets-peer-review-and-its-discontents/

Checkpoint #1: the reviewers

30 Knowledge communication (I) Image source: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/as-good-as-it-gets-peer-review-and-its-discontents/

Peer review in academic journals
• Scientists share knowledge with each other through publications in
academic journals.

• What are the roles of academic journals?

• To build a collective knowledge base
• To communicate information
• To validate the quality of research

• Peer review is expected to play a role in validating the quality of submitted

manuscripts.

31 Knowledge communication (I)

An imperfect system
• Scientists have been trying to find ways to produce stem cells from adult
cells.
• Adult cells are specialized for different functions.
• Stem cells can be transformed into different types of tissues—leading to the
possibility of repairing damages of different tissues.
• In 2014, scientists from the RIKEN institute in Japan reported an easy
method to produce stem cells from adult cells, in two Nature papers.
• The method was called STAP—Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency.
• It was found later in the same year that the data were fabricated.
• How could the manuscripts get through the peer review process?

32 Knowledge communication (I)

Correct editorial decisions?
• Siler, Lee and Bero (2015)
examined the citation counts of
accepted AND rejected
manuscripts submitted to
three leading medical journals.
• Over average, rejected
manuscripts—those subsequently
published elsewhere—received
fewer citations.
• However, many highly cited
manuscripts were rejected.

33 Knowledge communication (I) (Siler, Lee & Bero, 2015)

The rich get richer in academia?
• Was it easier for researchers from prestigious institutions to publish in top
journals?

• Peters and Ceci (1982) asked whether there was a “prestige” bias in
manuscript evaluation.
• They resubmitted 12 articles recently published in journals with high rejection
rates (80%) under fictitious names and institutions.
• Nine of the 12 resubmissions were processed.
• Eight of the nine processed resubmissions were rejected.
• Different author identities resulted in different outcomes.

34 Knowledge communication (I)

Increase transparency
• Traditionally, the peer review process is very opaque.
• Increase in transparency may help reduce bias in the peer review process.
• Open peer review is a response to this.

35 Knowledge communication (I) Image source: https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/learning/open-peer-review

Undisclosed vs. open review
• Making peer review open did NOT change the distribution of
recommendations.

36 Knowledge communication (I) (Bravo et al., 2019)

 When peer review functions properly …

Despite its limitations, peer

review can help validate and
improve the quality of published
research articles.

37 Knowledge in social sciences Image source: https://biologue.plos.org/2012/08/03/openly-streamlining-peer-review/

Key messages
• Science communication plays an important role in helping people make
informed decisions.
• The social media is a natural platform for science communication.
• Science communication is often a challenging, yet very important, task.
• Although bias may exist in the peer review process, it is still the best
available mechanism to validate the quality of publications.

38 Knowledge communication (I)

References
Allchin, D. (2023). Ten competencies for the science misinformation crisis. Science Education, 107(2), 261-
274. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21746
Alsop, S. (1999). Understanding understanding: A model for the public learning of radioactivity. Public
Understanding of Science, 8(4), 267–284. https://doi.org/10.1088/0963-6625/8/4/301
Bravo, G., Grimaldo, F., López-Iñesta, E., Mehmani, B., & Squazzoni, F. (2019). The effect of publishing peer
review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals. Nature Communications, 10(1), 1–8.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-08250-2
Burns, T. W., O’Connor, D. J., & Stocklmayer, S. M. (2003). Science communication: a contemporary definition.
Public Understanding of Science, 12(2), 183–202. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625030122004
Challenger, A., Sumner, P., & Bott, L. (2022). COVID-19 myth-busting: an experimental study. BMC Public
Health, 22, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-12464-3
Fischhoff, B. (2013). The sciences of science communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 110(supplement_3), 14033–14039. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1213273110
Islam, M. S., Sarkar, T., Khan, S. H., Mostofa Kamal, A., Hasan, S. M. M., Kabir, A., Yeasmin, D., Islam, M. A., Amin
Chowdhury, K. I., Anwar, K. S., Chughtai, A. A., & Seale, H. (2020). COVID-19–Related Infodemic and Its Impact
on Public Health: A Global Social Media Analysis, The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene,
103(4), 1621–1629. https://doi.org/10.4269/ajtmh.20-0812

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References
Li, H. O.-Y., Bailey, A., Huynh, D., & Chan, J. (2020). YouTube as a source of information on COVID-19: A
pandemic of misinformation? BMJ Global Health, 5, e002604. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-002604
Peters, D. P., & Ceci, S. J. (1982). Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles,
submitted again. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 5(2), 187–255.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00011183
Pickles, K., Cvejic, E., Nickel, B., Copp, T., Bonner, C., Leask, J., Ayre, J., Batcup, C., Cornell, S., Dakin, T., Dodd, R.
H., Isautier, J. M. J., & McCaffery, K. J. (2021). COVID-19 Misinformation Trends in Australia: Prospective
Longitudinal National Survey. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(1) https://doi.org/10.2196/23805
Ripple, W. J., Meijaard, E., & Newsome, T. (2018). Saving the World with Satire: A Response to Chapron et
al. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 33(7), 483–484. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2018.04.011
Siler, K., Lee, K., & Bero, L. (2015). Measuring the effectiveness of scientific gatekeeping. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(2), 360–365.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1418218112

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