Most scientists in the US and UK blame public ignorance of science for flawed policy preferences and political choices. They tend to be critical of media coverage, yet rate favorably their own experience with the media. Scientists say policy-makers and journalists are the most important groups to engage and view the public as having secondary importance in political decision-making. Among scientists, perceptions of science-related policy debates are likely to be influenced by ideology and like-minded information sources such as blogs.
How Scientists View the Public, the Media, and the Political Process | Climate Shift.
Great find, Britt! I’ll probably incorporate this into my presentation at APPE. The deficit model they describe, that scientific engagement with society is premised on society’s lack of scientific understanding, seems to pair well with a similar kind of deficit model: the relationship between science and society is characterized by a kind of contractual debt that must be paid by scientists to society, and now the response is to pay that debt through metrics of societal impact.
And this second kind of deficit model seems insufficient for similar reasons as the first: they both assume that the nature of the exchange (between science and society) is epistemic. I would argue, on the contrary, that it is political – which entails ethical, social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions that aren’t captured by, but are obviously implicated in, describing the exchange purely in terms of knowledge transfer.