Assessing what to address in science communication

TLDR

In democratic societies, people face complex decisions on issues such as climate change, vaccines, GM food, nanotechnology, and geoengineering, yet experts often fail to communicate effectively because they lack insight into what audiences need to know and how they describe concepts. The paper introduces how experts can use mental‑model research with audiences to guide communication. The authors describe conducting interviews to map audience mental models, identify gaps and preferred wording, and designing follow‑up surveys to assess belief prevalence and behavior relationships. Applications across domains demonstrate that this approach improves recipients’ understanding and decision‑making.

Abstract

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.