Winning greater influence for science

Issues in Science and Technology, Summer 2003 by Yankelovich, Daniel

In this space 20 years ago, I reported on the unwritten social contract between scientists and society: an unspoken agreement that gives science a "creative separateness from involvement with goals, values, and institutions other than its own." My conclusion then was that "To an impressive extent, [science's] ... insistence on autonomy has worked brilliantly," although the contract came with a huge, though hidden, price tag.

This "social contract" has allowed science to pursue long-term fundamental questions and to build slowly on the basis of its new knowledge. Science has been able to do this even in the context of a society such as ours, which in most domains is impatient, excessively pragmatic, and thinks only in the short term. But this same social contract is responsible for the widening disparity between the sophistication of our science and the relatively primitive state of our social and political relationships.

Now, 20 years later, both the successes and the price tag of this social contract have grown. Science has reached greater heights of sophistication and productivity, while the gap between science and public life has grown ever larger and more dangerous, to an extent that now poses a serious threat to our future. We need to understand the causes of the divide between science and society and to explore ways of narrowing the gap so that the voice of science can exert a more direct and constructive influence on the policy decisions that shape our future.

The great divide

In today's public domain, scientists are highly respected but not nearly as influential as they should be. In the arena of public policy, their voices are mostly marginalized. They do not have the influence due to them by virtue of the importance and relevance of their work and of the promises and dangers it poses for our communal life.

Among the many reasons for science's lagging influence, the major one is difficult to engage directly, because it is so elusive. The unfortunate reality is that scientists and the rest of society operate out of vastly different worldviews, especially in relation to assumptions about what constitutes knowledge and how to deal with it. Scientists share a worldview that presupposes rationality, lawfulness, and orderliness. They believe that answers to most empirical problems are ultimately obtainable if one poses the right questions and approaches them scientifically. They are comfortable with measurement and quantification, and they take the long view. They believe in sharing information, and their orientation is internationalist because they know that discoveries transcend borders.

The nonscientific world of everyday life in the United States marches to a different drummer. Public life is shot through and through with irrationality, discontinuity, and disorder. Decisionmakers rarely have the luxury of waiting for verifiable answers to their questions, and when they do, almost never go to the trouble and cost of developing them. Average Americans are uncomfortable with probabilities, especially in relation to risk assessment, and their time horizon is short. Policymakers are apprehensive about sharing information and are more at home with national interests than with internationalism. Most problems are experienced with an urgency and immediacy that make people impatient for answers; policymakers must deal with issues as they arise and not in terms of their accessibility to rational methods of solution.

This profound difference in worldview manifests itself in a many forms, some superficial, some moderately serious, and some that cry out for urgent attention. Here are three relatively superficial symptoms of the divide:

Semantic misunderstandings about the word "theory." To the public, calling something a "theory" means that it is not supported by tested, proven evidence. Whereas a scientist understands a theory to be a well-grounded explanation for a given phenomenon, the general public understands it as "just a theory," no more valid than any other opinion on the matter. (Evolutionary "theory" and creationist "theory" are, in this sense, both seen as untested and unproven "theories" and therefore enjoy equivalent truth value.)

Media insistence on presenting "both sides." When this confusion over "theory" bumps up against media imperatives, the result is often a distorting effort to tell "both sides" of the story. In practice, this means that even when there is overwhelming consensus in the scientific community (as in the case of global warming), experts all too often find themselves pitted in the media against some contrarian, crank, or shill who is on hand to provide "proper balance" (and verbal fireworks). The resulting arguments actively hinder people's ability to reach sound understanding: Not only do they muddy the public's already shaky grasp of scientific fundamentals, they leave people confused and disoriented.

Science's assumption that scientific illiteracy is the major obstacle. When faced with the gap between science and society, scientists assume that the solution is to make the public more science-literate-to do a better job at science education and so bring nonscientists around to a more scientific mindset. This assumption conveniently absolves science of the need to examine the way in which its own practices contribute to the gap and allows science to maintain its position of intellectual and moral superiority. In addition, on a purely practical level a superficial smattering of scientific knowledge might cause more problems than it solves. Two other manifestations of the divide are less superficial and more serious: