The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication
Abstract
The cross-disciplinary Oxford Handbook on the Science of Science Communication contains 47 essays by 57 leading scholars organized into six sections: The first section establishes the need for a science of science communication, provides an overview of the area, examines sources of science knowledge and the ways in which changing media structures affect it, reveals what the public thinks about science, and situates current scientific controversies in their historical contexts. The book’s second part examines challenges to science including difficulties in peer review, rising numbers of retractions, publication and statistical biases, and hype. Successes and failures in communicating about four controversies are the subject of Part III: “mad cow,” nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the HPV and HBV vaccines. The fourth section focuses on the ways in which elite intermediaries communicate science. These include the national academies, scholarly presses, government organizations, museums, foundations, and social networks. It examines as well scientific deliberation among citizens and science-based policymaking. In Part V, the handbook treats science media interactions, knowledge-based journalism, polarized media environments, popular images of science, and the portrayal of science in entertainment, narratives, and comedy. The final section identifies the ways in which human biases that can affect communicated science can be overcome. Biases include resistant misinformation, inadequate frames, biases in moral reasoning, confirmation and selective exposure biases, innumeracy, recency effects, fear of the unnatural, normalization, false causal attribution, and public difficulty in processing uncertainty. Each section of the book includes a thematic synthesis.
Keywords:
science of science communication,
media,
elite intermediaries,
biases,
mad cow,
nanotechnology,
biotechnology,
vaccination
Bibliographic Information
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Print Publication Date:
- Jun 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190497620
- Published online:
- Jun 2017
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190497620.001.0001
Editors
Kathleen Hall Jamieson,
editor
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania and the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of its Annenberg Public Policy Center. She is co-founder of FactCheck.org, which researches the veracity of claims made by political players. Its SciCheck feature was launched in 2015 to expose the misuse of scientific evidence in political discourse.
Dan M. Kahan,
editor
Dan M. Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School. He is a member of the Cultural Cognition Project, an interdisciplinary team of scholars who use empirical methods to examine the impact of group values on perceptions of risk and science communication.
Dietram A. Scheufele,
editor
Dietram A. Scheufele is the John E. Ross Professor in Science Communication and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in the Morgridge Institute for Research. His research deals with the interface of media, policy and public opinion.
