Contemporary scientific and technological endeavours face public and political pressure to adopt open, transparent and democratically accountable practices of public engagement. Prior research has identified different ways that experts \'imagine publics\' - as uninformed, as disengaged, as a risk to science, and as co-producers of knowledge - but there has yet to be a systematic exploration of how these views emerge, interact and evolve. This article introduces a typology of imagined publics to analyse how publics are constructed in the field of forest genomics. We find that deficit views of publics have not been replaced by co-production. Instead, deficit and co-productive approaches to publics co-exist and overlap, informing both how publics are characterized and how public perceptions are studied. We outline an agenda for deepening and expanding research on public perceptions of novel technologies. Specifically, we call for more diverse and complex methodological approaches that account for relational dynamics over time.

Public and scientific consensus about climate change do not align. Problematically, higher scientific knowledge has been associated with lower acceptance of climate information among those with more conservative socio-political ideologies. Positive attitudes towards science can attenuate this effect. We investigated the association between endorsement of scientific inquiry (ESI) and decision-making with scientific evidence about climate policies. Participants rated support for 16 climate policies accompanied by weaker or stronger evidence. In study 1 (N = 503), higher ESI was associated with greater discernment between strongly and weakly evidenced climate policies, irrespective of worldview. In studies 2 (N = 402) and 3 (N = 600), an ESI intervention improved discrimination, and, in study 3, increased ESI specifically for hierarchical/individualistic participants. Unlike ESI, the link between scientific knowledge and evaluation of evidence was influenced by worldview. Increasing ESI might improve the evaluation of scientific evidence and increase public support for evidence-based climate policies.
UNASSIGNED: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10584-023-03535-y.

This article proposes a conceptual framework to study the social bifurcation of reality in polarized science-trusting and science-distrusting lay worldviews, by analyzing and integrating five concepts: science work, number work, emotion work, time work, and boundary work. Despite the epistemological asymmetry between accounts relying on mainstream science and science-distrusting or denialist ones, there are symmetrical social processes contributing to the construction of lay discourses. Through conceptual analysis, we synthesize an alternative to the deficit model of contrarian discourses, replacing the model of social actors as \"defective scientists\" with a focus on their culturally competent agency. The proposed framework is useful for observing the parallel construction of polarized realities in interaction and their ongoing articulation through hinge objects, such as vaccines, seatbelts, guns, or sanitary masks in the Covid-19 context. We illustrate the framework through a comparative approach, presenting arguments and memes from contemporary online media in two controversies: namely, vaccine-trusting versus vaccine-distrusting views and Covid-convinced versus Covid-suspicious discourses.

Developing the ecological scientist mindset among underrepresented students in ecology fields (Bowser and Cid, this Forum) provides timely and compelling strategies to broaden inclusion in ecology and environmental biology. Chronic underrepresentation of minorities in ecology and environmental disciplines (EE) is a crisis that is surprising to many, and even more surprising that, for African-Americans, this underrepresentation is more severe compared to other STEM disciplines. It is beyond irony that a discipline that values diversity as a cornerstone of ecological practice continues to struggle to achieve diversity in the ranks of its practitioners.

The field of behavioral genetics is experiencing a revolution following the development of genome-wide association studies and the availability of large datasets from international consortia. This rapid change could increase the existing gaps between basic research, translation, and public understanding of science. In the present work, we aim to synthesize key explanations of how public understanding of socio-scientific issues develop. We propose that integrating dual-process, motivated reasoning, and change management theories will increase the extent to which we understand, and can change, how people respond to findings from behavior genetics.

The purpose of this paper is to write about insights and special considerations for researchers who are, to some degree, \"insiders\" to the communities they study by expanding on the concept of representational ethics as applied to research in community psychology with diverse and marginalized groups. Representational ethics refers to the ways that researchers, artists, or corporations represent the identities of the people they portray in their communications. As community psychologists we generate and disseminate knowledge about the communities we work with, and in that process, create narratives about the people who participate in our studies. In preparing a report on psychological issues among Evangelical Christian refugees from the former Soviet Union, Dina Birman struggled with her portrayal of this group and her own status of being both an insider and an outsider to this community. When investigating academic aspirations and psychological distress among Muslim high school students, Ashmeet Oberoi was forced to acknowledge the one-sidedness of the discourse on autonomy and cultural socialization of Muslim adolescents. In her research with Cuban-educated doctors in Miami, Florida, Wendy Moore encountered similar issues as she considered how to represent gender dynamics among her participants.

暂无摘要。

After several years of loud and clear rejection, the idea of a public cognitive deficit insistently reappears in the agenda of Science Communication and Public Understanding of Science studies. This essay addresses two different kinds of reason - practical and epistemic - converging at that point. In the first part, it will be argued that the hypothesis of the lack of knowledge among laypeople and its controversial relationships with their interests and attitudes towards science prevails because it is an intuitive and optimistic way to frame the gap between science and society and, therefore, to cope with its causes and consequences. In the second part, a deeper level of reasons will be examined, in order to show that the persistence of the idea has its roots in the objective epistemic asymmetry between scientists and the public, the scope of which is not always properly judged. To recognize this asymmetry as a previous condition for their interactions may help to surpass the byzantine debate: deficit yes or no and open up original questions for the field, summarized in the closing remarks.

For centuries, science communication has been widely perceived, irrespective of context, as a didactic enterprise. That understanding does not accommodate a political category of science communication, featuring citizens on an equal footing - some of them scientists - who share responsibility for public affairs and represent different points of view and ways of reasoning. That may harm, at the same time and for the same reasons, democratic knowledge societies as political entities and science as a body of knowledge and rational methodology. Scientists are discursively excluded from the public. The public is perceived in terms of knowledge deficiency. The latter perception has survived decades of critique, accompanied by attempts, along an everyman-as-scientist logic, to include all citizens in the scientific endeavour. But why should all be scientists? With respect to practical-political issues - as distinct from technical-scientific ones - the acknowledgement of the citizenship of scientists seems more relevant. Only, this would challenge the widespread understanding of science as an all-purpose problem solver and the consequent ideas of politics.

The healthcare field contains a multitude of opportunities for science communication. Given the many stakeholders dancing together in a multidirectional tango of communication, we need to ask how much does the deficit model apply to the health field? History dictates that healthcare professionals are the holders of all knowledge, and the patients and other stakeholders are the ones that need the scientific information communicated to them. This essay argues otherwise, in part due to the rise of shared decision-making and patients and other stakeholders acting as partners in healthcare. The traditional deficit model in health held that: (1) doctors were experts and patients were consumers, (2) it is impossible for the public to grasp the many disciplines of knowledge in medicine, (3) if experts have trouble keeping up with medical research then the public surely can\'t keep up, and (4) it is safer for healthcare professionals to communicate to the public using a deficit model. However, with the rise of partnerships with patients in healthcare decision-making, the deficit model might be weakening. Examples of public participation in healthcare decision-making include: (1) crowd-sourcing public participation in systematic reviews, (2) public participation in health policy, (3) public collaboration in health research, and (4) health consumer groups acting as producers of health information. With the challenges to the deficit model in science communication in health, caution is needed with the increasing role of technology and social media, and how these may affect the legitimacy of healthcare information flows away from the healthcare professional.