The Science of Science Communication: National Academies Event Examines Our Inconvenient Minds and Social Identities

Over the past decade, there has been an explosion of research from the social and behavioral sciences offering insight on how individuals, social groups and political systems come to understand and make decisions related to science, the environment, technology, and medicine. Research in this area stretches across disciplinary boundaries, university departments, funding agencies and field-specific journals, is the subject of inquiry at journals like Science and Nature, debated in the media and at blogs, and the focus of top-selling books. Indeed, as New Scientist magazine proclaimed in a recent cover story: “It may be high time US scientists put aside their own scepticism about the ‘soft’ social sciences, and embrace what these studies have to say” about the communication processes shaping debates ranging from climate change to stem cell research. Enter the National Academies. Marshaling the very best of its convening and agenda-setting function, on May 20-21 in Washington, DC, the Academies will be hosting a prestigious 2-day Sackler Colloquia surveying the state-of-the-art of social science research on communication, connecting this research to its implications for science-related governance, policy and public engagement. Highlights include: A keynote address by Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the current best-seller Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. Presentations [...]