SciComm Conversations: “Showing the person behind the science”
Listen to “Showing the person behind the science. Guest: Marlene Altenmüller” on Spreaker.
Transcript
Achintya Rao [00:09]: Welcome to SciComm Conversations. My name is Achintya Rao. In this episode we explore the subject of personalisation in science communication, that is, making the person behind the science more visible. I spoke with Dr Marlene Altenmüller, Junior Professor at the Leibniz Institute for Psychology, on whether this personalisation fosters trust in – and acceptance of – science. Marlene had presented her research at the PCST conference in Aberdeen last year, where this interview was conducted.
Marlene Altenmüller [00:43]: Hello, my name is Marlene Altenmüller. I’m a psychologist from Germany. I am at ZPID, which is the Leibniz Institute for Psychology in Trier. Before I was at LMU Munich, where I did my PhD in Social Psychology and my postdoc there. Now I’m at Junior Professor for Science Reception. So this is I think the first psychology professorship for something related to how people perceive science, which is really cool. At least in Germany. My background is very much in psychology, but I do have a bachelor’s in Art History as well. I have this very different interest in humanities and arts, which is really cool because it influences now how I look at science reception, science communication, and so on, across a very broad range of disciplines.
AR [01:32]: The research that you presented here at the PCST conference is around personalisation in science communication. So can you perhaps start by telling us, telling the listener, what personalisation in science communication actually is?
MA [01:44]: Yeah, personalisation is, what I… so personalisation is, what I would say is making the person behind a science more visible. We often talk about, “Show the human behind the science,” “Scientists are also human beings,” and so on, and all these kinds of takes we have on how researchers appear as more than just their science is what I would call personalisation, making the personal visible, basically.
AR [02:11]: And why have [scientists] felt the need to personalise themselves in this way? So making that human behind the research visible, has there been a… has there been a marked shift in your experience?
MA [02:21]: That’s a good question. I can’t really speak for other researchers, I think, but I’ve come across this recommendation quite a lot. So very often, if you look at the top five tips for science communication or something like this, one of the top tips will always: be the approachable, make yourself relatable, tell a personal story, tell an anecdote from your life. So this idea of presenting yourself as more than a scientist is very commonplace. And my impression is that a lot of researchers think that they need to bridge this distance from the stereotypical ivory tower, that they assume that many people feel towards science, by showing their human side and by showing they’re just like everyone else, right? Scientists are also people.
AR [03:07]: I was reading one of your research papers, the one that you published recently, and I love that you start off by talking about… was it guinea pigs? You were trying to make it personal, you were trying to sort of be very meta about it and you start off by talking about, “Marlene has two guinea pigs.” And can I just ask you what made you think that you should introduce your paper in that way? And did… were there any objections from the reviewers or the editors? Did you get any pushback?
MA [03:31]: Oh, I need to think back on this. I think actually the review is one of the reviewers said, “It’s a nice story, but it’s… why do you do this?” It was raised in peer review, but not like in a way to tell me not to do it, but they noted it. I mean, we will talk about the results of this research. And thinking about results, I was really considering hard whether I should start a paper by adding something personal, but it just felt right, writing a paper about personalisation, about self-disclosure in science communication. I mean, that has to start with self-disclosure, right? So I was considering this quite a bit, but then I decided just go on with it, just do this. And so, yeah, my guinea pigs are now part of the published literature in psychology.
AR [04:18]: And you didn’t make them up, they are actually your guinea pigs.
MA [04:21]: Yeah, I mean, the paper was published two years ago, so they are not there anymore, but I have them now forever in this paper, which is really cool.
AR [04:30]: So, let’s get back your research then. Your research is trying to understand from a psychological perspective, if this personalisation is a good thing overall or not. So, talking about guinea pigs, talking about personal anecdotes, is that a good thing or not? So, can you tell our listeners a bit more about your work in a very broad sense?
MA [04:51]: So in this paper, we really wanted to get at this idea of personalisation, and we were wondering, what is it psychologically speaking about? So, what does personalisation do and how can it look like in science communication? And one concept that’s quite common and well studied in social psychology is self-disclosure, which basically means telling one or more other people anything personal about yourself. So all kinds of things, it’s a very broad definition. And this self-disclosure has been studied very extensively in the past in social psychology, showing that, actually, if you share something about yourself, the other person will feel more close to you and there’s even some research suggesting it makes people trust you more.
So, it seemed very promising because there was so much research there that researchers showing a bit about themselves, making themselves vulnerable through their audience by sharing personal details and not just hiding behind this façade of science would maybe make the audience trust them more. And we took this idea of self-disclosure, all the past research that’s been done there and applied to then to the context of science communication and looked at it from this stance, by having researchers… showing participants materials were researchers disclose personal details or not. So this was basic idea.
AR [06:06]: So, let’s get into the weeds of the research methods. How did you actually go about studying personalisation in the context of science communication?
MA [06:15]: Yeah. So, we started out as psychologists always like to do with very standardised materials. So, we made up findings, we made up very clearly comparable conditions, we had one condition where people clicked through slides of an alleged scientific talk on a fictitious finding. So they clicked through slides and everyone got the same information but in one condition, illustrative information on pictures on the slides were framed slightly differently. So, in one condition it might say this is a picture from my window and in the other condition it would say this is a picture from a window. So, everyone got the same bits of information but the framing changed just the slight bit, as making this information a personal disclosure or just some random information basically. And this was included in a couple of these slides just illustrating the talk, not related to the communicated science at hand.
We did that in three studies where people clicked through these slides and then afterwards reported how close they felt to the researcher, how trustworthy they thought this researcher was. And trustworthiness we measured in terms of warmth-related trustworthiness, benevolence, integrity, and in terms of competence-related trustworthiness, which is perceived expertise. And we also asked people afterwards, okay, now you read about this finding, how credible do you think this is going to be? So, do you think is this true? Do you think this is something you would act in line with? We also added behavioural intentions. And in these first three studies we just had these slides, right? So, it was really an online study, people clicked through these slides, was made-up findings about something psychology-related, so effects on darkness, on music enjoyment and something like this. And then we moved on in the other study. So, we did a fourth study where people actually watch an animated video, where we use the same idea of framing the same information as either personal or neutral in the subtitles of this video.
Then we moved this into a social-media context in the fifth study we showed people pictures like they would see on Instagram, where we used actual real evidence now, so we looked at a real study and then made up quotes of the researchers of the study, that were either personal or neutral. And people looked at these Instagram-like posts and then rated again trustworthiness, closeness, credibility and so on. And in a sixth study we then moved to real science communication and we took snippets from a science-communication channel on Twitter back then, which is the real scientist channel. And this is where researchers talk for a week, do micro-blogging on the site and talk about their research and also about themselves. And we showed people snippets from one week, where it was about stress research and we either showed just the scientific content or we left in the real self-disclosing content this researcher used, so this was really material that was just adapted slightly by us, and again we asked people about trustworthiness, closeness, evidence-credibility and so on.
And in the last study then we finally went to the field, and we had a really nice collaboration with Deutsches Museum, which is a German science museum, really large museum, and we had 500 people come to the museum and go through the marine-science exhibition with an interactive audio guide. And in this audio guide we again varied whether information was framed as personal or neutral. But in all these studies the information was really the same that people got and the communicated science was the same, we just varied whether the illustrative information was personal or neutral.
AR [09:46]: So you mentioned marine biology, marine sciences. What were the… what were the fields of research from which you extracted these science-communication people? Was it limited to marine biology? You mentioned you started off with psychology research. What was sort of the breadth of sciences that you covered?
MA [10:05]: So we did have the marine science one. We started off psychology. We had a more medical-related topic, then we had so one of the social-media things was on stress research and one was on autism research I think. So many of our studies, just by closeness of what comes to mind when you design study materials is often rooted kind of in social sciences and psychology because it’s just easier to design study materials in this, but you do try to have like a larger breadth of disciplines there because I think it actually really matters.
AR [10:37]: We can come to that actually about whether it really matters. Can you… can… let’s talk about it right now then! Can you elaborate on why you think it really matters whether the personalisation has different effects depending on what discipline is being represented by the science communicators?
MA [11:00]: Or I can talk about this for hours.
AR: You have four minutes!
MA: The thing is that often in the psychology of science reception, science communication, we think about where do people come from when they are confronted with science, what are their mental images they hold, so basically a stereotype approach, what are the stereotypes about science. And we often say, well, researchers have this stereotype about scientists as being highly competent but only moderately warm, maybe even lacking warmth, morality and so on. So this warm-through related aspect is really something that we need to target more is the conclusion we often draw on. This is what self-disclosure does, it targets warmth, interpersonal warmth. But we do have some studies now coming out, we conducted one ourselves as well, where we see that this stereotype is really not the same for disciplines. So the highly-competent-but-only-moderately-warm stereotype only applies to the science-y, science-y, hard-science disciplines. And if you look more in social sciences for example or even in arts and humanities, with a broad understanding of what science and academic research could be, we see that the stereotype sometimes even reverses.
So we do have evidence showing that something like art-history scholars or philosophers, theologians and so on are perceived as quite warm but not as competent. So the stereotype we often work with is very specific to some disciplines and it shows that probably what we do in science communication needs to consider these disciplines a lot more than we currently do. We often take this broad brushstroke about science and generalise it to all kinds of sciences in different fields, but I think it really matters what kind of discipline is communicating, what kind of evidence is the one that you focus on in your science communication and so on. And so this whole research about personalisation I think it comes from this very broad idea of we need to target warmth, but probably this could even be a problem. So personalisation in the humanities for example could even have detrimental effects. So I think disciplines matter yeah.
AR [13:04]: Let’s go back to the research that you did on personalisation specifically in science communication. You did some research in science museums. And across the research that you’ve done, specifically to personalization in science communication, what were your findings? Does warmth increase? Are there any negative aspects of it?
MA [13:26]: Yeah, so we went in with the strong hunch based on prior literature and theorising, that it should definitely increase warmth-related trustworthiness if people disclose personal details. But we weren’t so sure about the competence-related aspects, because we were saying maybe people find it a bit inappropriate or unprofessional if researchers suddenly start to talk about their personal lives, if you really just want the factual information from them. And this is in fact what we kind of found in our studies. So we see that indeed self-disclosing researches are perceived as a bit closer to you. So interpersonal closeness increases if you use self-disclosure. We see this also warmth-related trustworthiness. So there’s positive effects of self-disclosure. But we do see that self-disclosing researches are ascribed less expertise. So we have trade-off effects. You win some, you lose some, that’s what I would say, with self-disclosure.
But I have to say that across all these studies, we found very inconsistent effects. So in some studies we found positive effects. In other studies we found negative effects. And only across all of these studies we conducted – so there were six online studies, one field experiment in total – only across all of these studies we found these trade-off effects. So effects seem really volatile and inconsistent, and there we’re overall talking about effect sizes, also not large effects. So it’s really small effects, which makes us question a bit what their practical relevance could actually be. I mean the self-disclosure we used was very subtle. So it might be that this plays a role, but it seems like this holy grail of personalisation, the promise that’s often attached to this idea of making yourself more visible as a person, might not be that relevant in practical science communication.
AR [15:09]: You know, you spoke about different fields and how in the sort of harder natural sciences there is a perception that the researchers aren’t as warm, but are more competent. And if there is even this slight trade-off from personalisation, of them being perceived as being a little bit warmer but then being perceived also as being less competent, however slight the effect maybe you know, perhaps the effects are will be larger if observed in different contexts or over time… And what do you then the implications of this work? Should we be telling the researchers, “Please return to the ivory towers because you will not be perceived as warm and friendly and human, but you will be perceived as good researchers, good scientists, competent scientists, competent researchers.”
MA [15:53]: Yeah. I think it’s a tricky question to be honest, but my hunch is that probably the more is not always the better, right? So sometimes we can maybe give up a bit of this “genius aura” that scientists have about themselves in the public eye and say, okay, maybe let’s show a bit more of our warm side even if it risks maybe this idea of all researchers as smart geniuses. I think we can dare to give that up a bit, but probably not everyone should do this. So as we talked about before, right? There’s different disciplines. If you’re in a discipline that’s already struggling from a perception of being maybe not as competent, not as having… as much expertise as other researchers, then maybe this is not the tactic you should choose. So there is a lot more nuance I think in who should do this and who shouldn’t. But overall I wouldn’t say that these ambivalent findings now tell us that we should not use personalisation, not at all actually, but I think it should be used a bit more mindfully. So this is my takeaway. Scientists can use personalisation. They should be aware that it might endanger their expertise perceptions from lay people. Yeah, but I think as long as you know what you’re doing, you can use it more considered.
AR [17:15]: Be selective. Yeah, it’s a fascinating piece of research, I mean like area of research as well, because yeah, there’s… Scientists were previously sort of perceived even whether if it’s the ivory tower or not, but the information about science came to people for a very long time, through intermediaries and not directly through the scientists. But the fact that we are now able to have scientists talk directly… There is some sort of personalisation that happens automatically by you communicating science, even if you are talking about science: the fact that people see your face, see where you’re working, what kind of coffee you drink, incidentally.
MA [17:50]: And there’s a lot to communicate with our words, right? As you say, just the clothes you wear tells something about yourself, and how you choose to present yourself is telling the world something about yourself. And sometimes we can’t even choose what other people take from this. So there’s always this aspect to disclosure as well. I don’t know whether we want to go to this, I think this links quite well to other research we did that shows that lay people are very sensitive towards these cues of what else is there than the science about a researcher, right? For example, we did a study on Me-search. So when researchers study something that’s it is incredibly relevant to themselves.
AR: Okay, so me as an ME.
MA: Me as an ME, yeah. Me-search, research, this is a wordplay here. And there’s quite a lot of discussions on whether it’s okay or even good or bad if researchers study something like… So we did a study where we had a study in the context of LGBTQ and researcher disclosed of being homosexual or heterosexual. And we had a study of veganism perceptions where the researcher was a vegan or not a vegan. And we found that the disclosure of what was perceived to be not the norm, so the homosexual and vegan researcher, were perceived a lot more ambivalently than the other researchers. Some people thought it’s great if people are personally affected by their research because it gives them more expertise, they really know what they’re talking about and so on. And others, especially those that were more critical to begin with regarding the topic, were thinking, “Oh, this researcher has to be biased, this can’t be credible research that’s been done here.” So these kinds of personal details, if you disclose them, it actually opens the door for this motivated reception of either up-valuing your research and you as a person or down-valuing it.
I think there’s a completely different discussion we could have about what really is the me-searcher in this case, right? Is not the one that’s not affected by their research also a me-searcher in a way? But people do take this information, these personal information bits, and use them to judge the science at hand, which is I think very much in line with what we know about psychology of science and so on. But also interesting, because it means everything you share about yourself is also attached with a risk.
AR [20:14]: Yeah, there’s a lot of implicit, nuanced information that you’re communicating, whether you’re choosing to or not. Yeah, it’s fascinating. In terms of this particular project, you’ve done sort of seven studies and you’ve come up with… your research shows that there are slight effects in warmth and competence. What are the next steps for your work? Are you planning on conducting this research in other contexts, in different fields or in contexts such as… you’ve done the study in museums, what about in in science cafés where there is an expectation of personalisation? If you’re doing some, an event where people sit down around a pub and talk about science and have a scientist come and talk over drinks, there is an expectation that is going to be a more relaxed, human-connected affair. Or what about in different countries and cultures as well? What are your thoughts about the next steps? I mean, I’m not saying you definitely do all of these, but what are you interested in pursuing?
MA [21:16]: Oh, I’m interested in all of them. [laughs] I think right now we’re pursuing a kind of… a few different paths from there that take this topic of personalisation a different piece. So we do have one area, something I talked about here at PCST as well, was this idea of, okay, if researchers themselves disclosing details maybe risks their own expertise because it seems unprofessional, maybe someone else can disclose details about them or portray them in a more human-like way. So this could be science journalists for example, right? How they write about researchers. And in one line of research we currently test whether the use of different quotation styles, direct quotations, giving the researcher voice in your piece of science journalism, indirect quotations, paraphrasing or not giving the researcher any voice in your piece, has an effect on perceived closeness and trust in research. So far, very inconclusive results. So we’re gonna follow up on this, but this is one idea, so someone else might be able to put on other science.
Then in a different line of research, we want to disentangle this discipline-idea more. So different disciplines using different tactics focused on either warmth, for example with disclosure, or more on competence with other ways of science communication, can we see different effects with different disciplines here, as we would expect? And this research is going to be conducted… so currently planning a bigger project here. This is going to be conducted in Germany, in the US and in Indonesia to have like a really bigger scope of different cultures and different approaches to maybe science stereotypes as well. So there is a lot going on right now and I think many different takes we can take on personalisation as well. Personalisation could take many forms. Disclosure is just one of them.
So one idea we take from sociology and psychology and the intersection between them is the idea of different roles people take on. Depending on the role you currently have people also have different expectations of how to fulfil this role. And this is probably very important in science communication. So if you’re interviewed in a TV series for example, about a specific finding, people have the expectation of you as a knowledge provider on this specific finding, and here it would be probably perceived as more negative if you disclose personal details. But if you are engaged in a science café or a show or something like this, where people expected you to fulfil another role of the publicly oriented researcher, making personal connections, people would expect this and they would find it maybe negative if you didn’t tell them anything about yourself. And there is also research if there is a dialogic format, this comes from self-disclosure research as well, that if only one of the partners in a conversation discloses details and the other chooses not to disclose details, this is actually a lot more negative than just choosing to not disclose any… for both partners. So this is a dyadic process and is reciprocal, and if one person doesn’t give back what you pay into it can be even negative in the experience.
AR [24:30]: That’s really fascinating. I mean there’s so much psychology about our interactions with others and the cues that we take, and this is really this is really interesting work. You’ve touched a little bit upon this in terms of one of the responses to give earlier but if you had to give some advice or researches that are based on your findings what would it be? You did say earlier that be a bit aware of the context and, like, think about what is appropriate, what is the expectation in your field, but sort of generally what advice would you give?
MA [25:04]: I think I struggle a lot more with the advice question than other scholars from like science communication, because as psychologists we often kind of put ourselves in this spot, well we just do studies, right? We just describe… what happens in the real world is up to other people. Our evidence is not ready to be taken for granted in actual science communication. I think I would dare to go a little bit further, so I would say something that this really shows us is how mindful we should be of science-communication practices and tips we maybe get. And that there’s not this one-fits-all solution. So we can’t just look up the five best tips for science communication and say if you fulfil these five tips everyone will be a great communicator. That’s just not how it works. You always have to adapt to your audience, you have to know who you’re talking to, you have to be aware of your role that you’re currently speaking in, right? Is this now a situation where it’s just about you communicating facts, this is about a situation where this is actually about personal relationships that should be built in a different format, and all these things have to be taken into consideration. And for personalisation specifically I think there is a place, a time and place, for these tactics – I mean tactics always sounds so intentional and strategic right? But I mean just choosing this way of communicating, there is a place for this where it’s probably also helpful but this idea of “Just show a little bit of yourself and everything will be fine,” that’s not how it works. So not real advice but…!
AR [26:39]: Yeah, be mindful is generally good advice. Well, Marlene thank you so very much.
MA: Thank you for your interest.
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