Science communication

Science communication covers a broad set of activities that link science with the wider world. Its common aims are to share new findings with non-experts, spark public curiosity about science, shape people’s views and actions, guide policy decisions, and work with different communities to tackle social issues. The term usually refers to outreach—talking to audiences who aren’t specialists in the topic—but some writers also count expert-to-expert communication, like publishing in academic journals, as a form of science communication.

The people who do science communication come from many backgrounds: scientists, journalists, artists, doctors, educators at nature centers, policy advisors, and anyone else who talks about science with the public. They often use humor, storytelling, and metaphors to entertain and persuade, connecting with what their audience cares about. Science communication is also a field of social science research, studying things like misinformation, public views on new technologies, and how science becomes politicized or polarized. For a long time, this research had little effect on how science communication was actually done, and vice versa, but both sides are now trying to work more closely together.

In the past, academic scientists were often told not to spend time on public outreach, but that’s changing. Research funders now expect scientists to have broader impacts beyond just publishing papers. More scientists, especially younger ones, want to engage the public through social media and in-person events, though they still face major institutional hurdles. Science communication overlaps with informal science education, citizen science, and public engagement with science, and there’s no clear agreement on how to tell them apart. Like other parts of society, it’s shaped by systemic inequalities that affect both outreach and inreach.

**Motivations**

In 1987, Geoffrey Thomas and John Durant gave several reasons for boosting public understanding of science, or scientific literacy. More trained scientists and engineers could make a country more competitive economically. Science can also help individuals directly—it has aesthetic appeal, as in popular science or science fiction, and living in a tech-heavy world, basic scientific knowledge helps people get by. Fields like the science of happiness have obvious personal benefits. Governments and societies gain too, because an informed public supports a more democratic society. Science can also guide moral choices, like whether animals feel pain, how human activity affects climate, or even the possibility of a science of morality.

In 1990, scholar Steven Hilgartner criticized some research on public understanding of science. He argued that the “dominant view” of science popularization tends to draw a sharp line around who can claim true, reliable knowledge. By treating the public as deficient recipients, scientists reinforce their own expert status. Seen this way, science communication may aim to connect scientists with society, but it can also strengthen the boundary between experts and everyone else—a point made by Brian Wynne in 1992 and Massimiano Bucchi in 1998. In 2016, the journal *Public Understanding of Science* ran an essay contest on the “deficit model,” asking why the idea of a public deficit keeps coming back. Carina Cortassa, for example, argued that this model is just one case of a universal problem in social epistemology: “epistemic asymmetry,” which happens whenever some people know more than others about a topic. Science communication is one way to reduce that gap.

Biologist Randy Olson warned in 2009 that anti-science groups can be so motivated and well-funded that science organizations’ political neutrality can lead to crises in public understanding. He pointed to denialism, like climate change denial, as an example. Journalist Robert Krulwich argued in 2008 that scientists’ stories compete with those of people like Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar, whose attractive, cheap creationist textbooks sold widely in Turkish schools despite the country’s strong secular tradition. Astrobiologist David Morrison has faced repeated disruptions from popular anti-science movements, including being called on to calm public fears about an imagined cataclysm.