Communicating for Impact, Not Attention
Communicating for Impact, Not Attention is a scholarly work, published in 2018 in ''BioScience''. The main subject of the publication is environmental science. Communicating for Impact, Not Attention S cience, particularly biology, can contribute to informed debate and decision- making on many important issues.However, ethics, economics, emotion, and many other factors inform whether and how people use scientific information to guide their decisions.A growing list of scientists have recently shared with me that they feel that decision-makers are prioritizing these other inputs over scientific information-often with significant public and environmental health implications.This critical issue begs for scientific community self-reflection.Some of this review began at the 2017 meeting of the leadership of American Institute of Biological Sciences member organizations.An outcome of this meeting was an affirmation that scientists and professional societies must consider novel and more effective ways to engage and subsequently influence decision-makers (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biy082).The community must be more mindful of how (method and message) it engages the public.Simply publishing results in a journal does not ensure findings are shared with or contextualized for target audiences.The meeting participants identified the need to employ novel communication channels to educate and engagewith social media, for example-and recognized this as an overlooked opportunity.Using modern and myriad communication tools can improve discoverability and public appreciation of research findings.Moreover, the effective deployment of these communication channels challenges scientists to think differently about how to convey information.Scientists must consider how an audience might perceive the message and how they desire to receive the information (e.g., as an image, audio, narrative, or interactive experience).In October, I had the pleasure of participating on a panel at the National Science Foundation's Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections summit meeting.The panel was a forum for biodiversity scientists working with digitized data and images to explore how social media tools can be used to engage new audiences.This kind of conversation about communication strategies is important and well worth having at all scientific conferences.The biology community must also consider the context and tone of its messages.Unduly provocative, angry, or dismissive language can garner public attention and increase the profile of an individual or organization.But the attention often comes with the cost of alienating the constituents whose support is needed to identify and enact solutions to complex problems.Authoritarian proclamations and language dismissive of the perspectives held by those with different opinions will not inspire audiences to acquiesce to your point of view.As authors now witness in politics, these behaviors harden already held beliefs and sacrifice opportunities for the identification of broadly embraced and widely informed solutions.Conversations ultimately engage more people and are a first step toward informed decision-making.More than a few colleagues and I have discussed in recent weeks the question of whether some fields within the biological sciences allocate too much of their communication and outreach energy to reinforcing negative or depressing messages.The list of problems facing humanity is significant, but if a group spends little energy sharing positive interventions or describing how research findings help solve problems, those outside of the community can reasonably assume there is little hope and, therefore, no benefit from action.