Empower with evidence
We recently came across this incredibly important editorial letter by Susan Amara, the president of AAAS, about the public’s trust in science and wanted to share it with our science loving audience. Read the full article below or click the link to see the article on Science.org.
This week (17 to 20 February), the virtual annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science) will address the challenges of building the public’s trust and understanding of science by illuminating both great science and innovative initiatives in advocacy, education, and policy. The theme, “Empower with Evidence,” speaks to the critical importance of decision-making, policy-making, and interventions that are grounded in knowledge and facts, not opinions—or worse, misinformation.
The ability of science to transform the world is increasingly threatened by misinformation that is jeopardizing trust in science. As highlighted in Science last week, the world’s information ecosystem is rapidly changing, and online environments have become a powerful open marketplace of facts, ideas, and opinions—where the meaningfulness of science is easily drowned out by the noise.
Solutions to this dilemma include training students and professional scientists to more effectively translate their work to the public, harnessing insights from the behavioral and social sciences to better engage with the public, and working with social media platforms to improve information delivery to a broader audience. These are important efforts, but do they get to the root of the problem?
Science has long been touted as the solver of all problems, and during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, the public craves certainty. But science is dynamic, and when knowledge changes—and technology is now enabling rapid changes—the public can become confused and even doubtful when shifts in understanding are framed the wrong way. Scientists and educators must do a better job of explaining how science works to the public, as well as to policy-makers and leaders. Science continually challenges and improves on the current state of knowledge. This is how the world progresses. It is the job of the scientific community to explain new findings in this context. Without this framing, the dynamic nature of science may be misunderstood as a weakness rather than a strength, and new findings may be misrepresented to the public. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed this vulnerability, with dire consequences. One need only look at the hundreds of thousands of needless deaths resulting from vaccine misinformation.
Part of making the scientific process less mysterious and questionable for everyone is providing greater transparency. Science advances through positive and negative results, and better ways are needed to report or share this information and present the full picture of studies. There also must be a means through which all fields of study commit to rigorously assessing the reproducibility of their findings. These are efforts that bolster, not diminish, confidence in science, both within and outside the scientific community. Collaborative and open science efforts have spurred the rapid growth of open-source platforms, data sharing, common methodology, and computational tools that enhance both scientific rigor and the generalizability of findings. Well-validated data are essential for the further development of new inventions and innovations. In parallel, the scientific enterprise still must provide opportunities for exploratory research, hypothesis-generating studies, and high risk–high reward endeavors, again affirming to the public that such pursuits can lead to deeper understanding as well as breakthrough discoveries.
As science progresses, society must be ever aware of the consequences. It can be challenging for advances that generate change to gain widespread acceptance. Sadly, there are examples throughout history in which scientific advances were implemented without careful thought about their long-term impacts on the environment or society. This breeds distrust in science. For example, the failure to consider subgroups in population-level research has sometimes led to social and economic disparities in human health. Conversely, stratification of subgroups in clinical trials—such as Black patients with congestive heart failure, for example—has led to improved therapies that might otherwise have been missed. Building greater diversity in the scientific workforce may also lead to a more equitable impact of new advances and improve the ability to communicate science to wider communities.
Public perception of science depends on an appreciation that the scientific process is nuanced and cannot be reduced to overstated conclusions, and worse, premature implications for use by society. Without this understanding, failures to predict outcomes or revisions of earlier findings may reinforce, in some quarters, a belief that science cannot be trusted. Let this be science’s overriding message: As new discoveries inevitably alter our understanding, the methods of science push us ever closer to the truth.
By Susan G. Amara
The president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Washington DC, USA.
Published by Science magazine. Access online: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo5963