Even if you refuse to admit it, there is a value judgment embedded in the way you choose to communicate your facts and findings. That value judgment is not a function of your response to the information, it is a function of your audience’s response.

it’s funny how sociology gets denigrated by some scientists…i remember being especially annoyed at the Speaking Science talk, when the few vocal ‘just state the facts’ folks chose to go on and on about their…rather rude frame that everyone else was ‘lying’ or ‘spinning’ things. ironic.

i’d say there’s ALSO a personal value judgment embedded in the way you choose to communicate your facts. if you don’t think there is, and you actively avoid framing content in a way your audience can relate to, i think that’s a kind of rationalism-will-prevail-and-i’m-the-example-of-that idea going into the presentation. which is a big turn-off, especially from a someone in a position of authority.

assuming that people just need to be better educated or more science-literate or more engaged in politics kind of ignores the fact that there are plenty of educated, science-literate, publicly-engaged people who sincerely disagree on what we should do about water quality and quantity, or carbon emissions, or transportation investments, or whatever.

clearly more (correct) facts are not what determines a person’s take on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but values. and thinking that everyone who doesn’t interpret your results the way you do is just being irrational or ignorant is pretty heady personal judgment.

One prominent example is evolution. The frame the opposition have chosen is “teach the controversy”, painting themselves as maverick outsiders rebelling against a stifling establishment, and manufacturing the controversy if need be. The frame the ACLU and most on the side of science education have chosen is “separation of church and state”, which may well be a good legal argument, but that doesn’t mean it plays well in the court of public opinion. Atheists often focus on the now objectively false statements religions have made about our origins, and our own evolutionary origins (unsurprisingly unpersuasive to most theists…). The National Academies of Science did a study on the effects of different framings of evolution in support of the design of this brochure and found that focusing on the applications to medicine, and thus the public good, (e.g. antibiotic resistance) got a much more positive response.

I think effective impromptu framing is mostly a question of really trying to understand who it is you’re talking to, what their point of view is, what their values are, avoiding talking down to them and avoiding trying to inform them about the science itself (unless you’re actually teaching a science class!), and more about the context of that science which is most likely to be meaningful to them. I also think that in most of the controversial areas, people have already done the focus group studies (or something like them), and all you need to do is find them.