With the many large-scale environmental challenges currently evident, it may be tempting to think solutions will simply require more ecological research to more fully describe processes underlying current conditions and offer clearer projections of future conditions. Ideally, once such information is generated, it would lead to the relevant policy actions and encourage adoption of behaviors to help address these challenges. However, even limited experience in the ecological sciences likely illustrates that such assumptions rarely hold true. While this can feel frustrating to ecological scientists who may feel that policy makers and the public “just don’t understand,” it is important to both 1) recognize that decisions about policy and behavior adoption are substantially more complex than these assumptions recognize and 2) consider how a better understanding of decision-making processes can help us become more effective as communicators.
Indeed, these ideas have been identified as essential to the founding of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) which has been described as being founded to “raise the public’s level of awareness of the importance of ecological science” and “ensure the appropriate use of ecological science in environmental decision making by enhancing communication between the ecological community and policy-makers” (https://www.esa.org/esa/about/).
Results/Conclusions
As Mascia et al. (2003) argue, conservation policies, practices, and associated behavior changes are all a function of human (social and psychological) phenomenon. Similarly, a review of federal research related to climate science found that while there had been substantial advances in understanding of climate science, there had been limited progress applying this knowledge to address impacts due to limited investment in related social science research, insufficient interdisciplinary research, and a lack of established networks between scientists and decision makers (NRC 2007, NRC 2009).
In this presentation, I share lessons learned in my journey from a beginning undergraduate ecology student where I found that humans were often lurking in the background of much of my coursework, typically viewed as an unnatural disturbance or as a barrier to implementing sound ecological decisions. We will examine assumptions that often underlie traditional views of science communication including the deficit model that views a scientifically-illiterate public as the underlying cause of lack of support for science (Sims et al. 2016). We will contrast this perspective with existing theory and research findings to provide a more complex illustration of the factors that influence human behavior, how people consider new information, and consider implications for improving our communication with non-ecological scientists.