By Hannah Little.
Humans have used stories to understand the world around us for millennia, from folktales to news stories, and from movies to the gossip we collect in the local pub. Science communicators have long been trying to capitalise on this most human instinct to pass on the information we hear in the form of stories. For science communication, stories enable us to foreground relevance, emotion and engagement, which can be used to persuade audiences or make information stick with people.
Not all stories are created equal; some are more memorable than others. Over the last twenty years, work from cognitive science and anthropology has been investigating what makes some stories stick with us more than others. Through this work, we know that humans have certain “cognitive biases” that cause us to pay attention to and remember certain types of stories, while others are ignored or forgotten. In our paper, we present a review of evidence of these cognitive biases: stories are remembered more faithfully when they are social, counterintuitive, negative or survival-orientated. For each of these biases, we then asked nineteen science communication professionals whether they use these biases in their storytelling practice and whether they felt using these tactics presented either benefits or risks for their science communication.
Through these interviews, science communicators expressed how crucial it was to use cognitive biases responsibly and ethically. They seemed happy to feature cognitive biases when the content they were communicating already lent itself to the cognitive bias—for instance, taking advantage of the counterintuitive bias when the science was already surprising. However, participants worried that cognitive biases might, in places, contradict the purpose of their communication. For example, communicators observed that some cognitive biases may prevent them from achieving things like behavioural change or engagement if participants are made to feel fatalistic or anxious via negative information, or cognitive biases could counter objectives by putting people off science if communication was too negative or alienating.
While all science communicators had concerns about cognitive biases that may harm audiences, contradict objectives or compromise integrity, some go further in not wanting their communication to look like they are using cognitive biases at all, as it risks the perception that their communication looks like misinformation, which is known to use these tactics, potentially leading audiences to perceive the stories as lacking integrity. However, in an attention economy, it may be necessary to use tactics that we know make our information more memorable. For science communication, this becomes a sensitive balancing act between communication being effective and maintaining credibility.
The evidence and discussion in the paper presents a rich and complex picture of storytelling practices in science communication. While it is hard to derive a message of best practice from the results, we have produced a practitioner-facing toolkit which highlights the importance of being aware of the evidence base for what makes stories stick with us and pairs this with strategic communication, being mindful of the aims of the communication and critical engagement with possible risks when using certain communication tactics, using examples from our interview study. The toolkit has been beautifully illustrated by Jordan Collver and can be downloaded as a PDF here.
Read the original research: ‘A fiction author can do anything, we’re bound by the facts’: The risks and opportunities of taking advantage of cognitive biases in storytelling for science communication.
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