Listen to the podcast:

Chat

1. Beach or the highway?
   • Dave is in Hawaii for this episode… recorded over 1 month ago!
   • Even after he drops the ridiculous British accent, he still sounds drunk. That isn’t the case. He was just really relaxed at the time.
   • As evidentce, notice the number of days from recording to publishing: July 5 - June 1.
2. Prepping for Dave's talk
   • Using the Hero’s Journey as a mode of scientific communication. It’s still a bit of a head scratcher for Dave.
   • We mention David Kaufer (the guy who rocks the rhetoric) here, but he won't actually be brought up by Jen until the beginning of our next episode. Stay tuned!
   • Dave did not ever manage to put the talk up online. If anyone cares, he can send the slides. Let us know.
   • Easter egg.
   • Let’s talk about Dr. Giles Brindley’s revealing research presentation for a moment...
   • Then let's hope that none of Dave's future potential employers ever listen to this show.

 

Continuing interview with Jen Briselli

You can review the last episode by reading the show notes from last time.

But we're going to repeat and enhance the most relevant links right here:
So we're talking to Jen Briselli. And while we said it would be a three part interview, it turns out it's going to be 3 + 1. It's just that good. The idea of the conversation is that communicating science to the public means understanding the audience and how we all have specific preceptions of risk correlated to our worldviews.

Jen's Master’s Thesis Project
A Design Strategy for Science Communication

Here are some useful links from the conversation:
Cultural Cognition
Dan Kahan blog.


And these are Dave's furiously scribbled notes:

Hierarchical (Like having roles defined and classification of social positions)
Egalitarian (Like when everyone has equal access to “things people need” which changes depending on who you ask.)
Communitarian (Puts the needs of the group over the self. Individual sacrifice is valued.)
Individualist (Concerned about threats to individual freedoms, even those that are intended to improve the condition of the group.)
Funny, lots of groups who are interested in this topic tend to be more egalitarian/communitarian.

Even though we like to make schematic characterizations of people, one study shows how that type of categorization fails:
“White male effect”
People who tend toward hierarchical/individualism seem to perceive less risk in the world. This tendency has more predictive power than race or gender.

The development of this model comes from lots of work in anthropology and psychology, as well at other fields. It’s not a personality assessment. We don’t know how people come to their personal orientation, and maybe that doesn’t matter. But culture cognition is also known as identity-protective cognition. Once our worldview is in place, we’ll look toward the people who closely reflect our own orientation as trustworthy sources of information.

So where do you fall? Try this fairly personable take on the industrial strength measures of risk. You can assess yourself.

This model is just about comparing people in a sample, not giving rigid boundaries to people. There are other examples of such thinking, like the recent rice/wheat paper.

That said, these categories are fairly good predictors of risk perceptions, at least on the potentially divisive issues studied by the culture cognition group at Yale. In one way, worldviews come through in almost every perception of risk, meaning that we don’t change our orientations for different topics. It can happen, but it's rare. One way it might occur is through self-reflection, a tendency that seems to be more about personality than worldview orientation. Another exception might happen for people who have a personal experience with a particular issue that moves their opinion to one that is otherwise out of sync with their normal beliefs.

But what Dave learned is that, when it matters, no one cares what “the research says…”

Now we get to the part about rhetoric… Next time!

The movie is Office Space.

Put it together in the end.

 

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(Cover image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photophone )

 

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