Junior Research Group fourC

Scientific knowledge plays a central part in solving today’s large challenges on a societal level, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, or digitization in domains such as transportation and health. On all these topics, scientists have been called upon to communicate their expert knowledge to a broader public. In doing so, scientists may serve a diverse set of aims, such as education, counseling, supporting private and public decision-making, involving non-experts in research, or building trust. As multifaceted as the aims are, so are the instances in which scientists transmit knowledge to others: when meeting with colleagues of more distant disciplines, or when being interviewed by a journalist on their latest research, but also when talking to family members over the holidays. Each of these opportunities poses different challenges:

• How to effectively transmit my main message?
• How to find the right balance between being too simplistic and too complicated?
• Which claims are justified based on the conducted research?
• And, most fundamentally: What does and what doesn’t fit my role as scientist – do I want to be a science communicator in addition to being a researcher and a teacher?

Communicating scientists are at the center of our research. We investigate the contexts, goals, forms and formats of scientists' communication activities. We want to find out why some scientists engage more with the public than others and what role scientific institutions play in this context. We investigate what messages researchers want to convey and how these messages can be communicated effectively so that communicating scientists achieve their goals. Our research has been incorporated into an evidence-based training program in which we prepare young scientists for their own science communication and the exchange with a broad public.

In the junior research group fourC, we take an interdisciplinary approach, which is most evident in our methodological approach: We triangulate social science research methods. On the one hand, we investigate the perspectives of the communicating scientists themselves by pursuing a qualitative approach and interviewing scientists from different disciplines and at different stages of their careers. On the other hand, we will use psychological intervention designs to develop and evaluate our training program (which we piloted in 2022). Finally, we will experimentally investigate how laypeople perceive communicating scientists and how they understand their science communication.