HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Emma Bloomfield.

She's Professor of Communications Studies at UNLV, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of the new book, Science Versus Story.

Emma, a pleasure to see you today.

BLOOMFIELD: Yes.

Thank you so much for having me.

HEFFNER: What is the derivation of the book?

The full title for our viewers is Science Not Versus Science V Story, which means versus, narrative strategies for science communicators.

When you started the project, what did you hope folks would get out of it?

And now that it's complete, what do you hope folks will get out of it?

BLOOMFIELD: Well, the story of this story of this book is that after I finished my first book, I was reflecting on the number of people who I interviewed and how oftentimes when I ask them questions, they immediately would launch into a story.

In the case of my first book, it was stories about the environment.

So I started to dive a little bit more deeper, more deeply into the role that stories play in our sensemaking around science, and the environment.

So in this book, my goal was to really think about when we say to people, tell your story, what are we really asking them to do?

So I wanted to give people practical tools, a skillset, reflection questions to think about when we tell people to tell their story about the world around them.

HEFFNER: Now you focus in the book on what you consider four areas of controversy in science, climate change, evolution, vaccination, and COVID-19.

Although vaccination and COVID-19 are connected, you could argue all four of those things are connected.

Take us through each one of those, how you settled on telling the story of these strategies through these four areas.

BLOOMFIELD: Well, I'll first mention, absolutely.

Vaccination and COVID-19 are intimately linked.

When I first proposed this book to the publisher in March of 2020, it just had three case studies.

As we saw COVID-19 quickly unfolded, and while vaccines were an important part of that story, it was also a story about lockdowns.

It was also a story about masking.

So we decided to add that as a fourth and separate case study.

Climate change is something I've been interested in for a while in a variety of books and articles that I've published.

It's perhaps the most pressing issue of our time is what are we going to do about our changing planet?

So for me, climate change is the core case study that is carried through all of the chapters.

But I wanted to talk about not just climate change, but other interconnected scientific issues.

Evolution is something I've been interested also for a while.

A lot of scientists consider it to be a foundation in science, literacy and public understanding of science.

And then of course, vaccination has become, um, even pre-covid was becoming an issue in terms of folks not want to get vaccinated due to the MMR vaccine.

And then covid becoming a more recent scientific controversy.

So I wanted to think about controversies over time, more historical ones versus more contemporary ones, and how scientific controversies pervade a variety of different issues, such as social, political, environmental health.

HEFFNER: When you talk about the strategies, did you want to target scientists?

The lay population?

Who are you hoping to guide in the process of delivering these strategies?

BLOOMFIELD: That's a great question, and, and part of the reason why in the title I talk about narrative strategies for science communicators is I want to expand the arena of who gets to consider themselves a science communicator.

Scientists are absolutely a goal population of the book.

I'm hoping that scientists will see themselves as communicators will be more willing and feel more confident to step out into public spaces to talk about their science and their role in science.

But I'm also hoping folks who are science journalists, folks who talk about science know in public spaces or social media, or even people having conversations with friends and family can consider themselves science communicators and part of science's storytelling.

HEFFNER: And what was most riveting to you?

I love what you said about the human proclivity to respond to a question with the story.

I think it is an authentic response.

We are drowned in information, via books like yours, social media, video, across television still.

Did you want to elucidate, illuminate in some way the distinctiveness of certain kinds of stories versus other stories?

Because everyone is selling a story.

Everyone is telling a story.

What separates you from the pack?

BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, that's a really great question.

So, I do agree fundamentally with the idea that we are all telling stories.

Part of the premise I set up in the book is that all forms of communication are stories or forms of storytelling.

Sometimes those stories are more overtly narrative, like a piece of media, and sometimes they might be less so like a scientific lecture or a scientific textbook.

But I still want to consider those forms of communication, storytelling, even if they aren't overtly.

So absolutely, I think of all of the communication as a type of storytelling.

So if we accept that premise, if you follow me, um, on, on that premise, then what can we do to strengthen the stories that are coming from scientific areas to compete with stories that are circulating from arenas like politics or even economics, areas of public discourse that are more adept at telling stories.

So I want to make those scientific ones more competitive in the larger arena of stories that circulate on these topics.

HEFFNER: Appreciate it.

That is helpful.

What I think is also helpful is talking about rhetorically, stylistically, whether it's in involving persuasion, or appealing to emotion.

What are the tactics that you're imparting in this book, in the storytelling?

Take us in depth and, and feel free to use examples of stories yourself, that you think are effective in communicating.

What is again going to make this distinctive when you, when you deploy certain strategies or tactics to appeal to people's intelligence or emotions?

BLOOMFIELD: Largely, the book concludes that the types of stories that are told in scientific arenas tend to be very broad, generalizable, and abstract, which makes sense based on the constraints, or the norms we think of in terms of science.

But I encourage in the book for scientific stories to adopt more concrete and specific elements.

So for example, you might think of Centers for Disease Control talking about COVID-19, talking about things at national levels, or talking about things based on their own group and institution, keeping everything really broad, abstract, and generalizable at the national level.

A better story or a story in tandem with that story might be more specific stories about local impacts, about individual families, making things nice and concrete and tangible for people.

In the case of health and medicine, we're oftentimes thinking about those decisions on a personal level, what's best for me and my health or my family's health.

So that can be in misalignment with these larger stories that groups are telling, at national or even in the case of vaccination, international levels.

The issues of scope is just one aspect in the book I talk about in terms of different narrative elements.

But scope, I think, is a really easy one to wrap our heads around.

The story of evolution is about billions of years in the world's history.

But we really, as people only make sense of a few years, maybe a decade or so in the past and into the future.

So there's misalignment in kind of the scope and that sense of the stories that we tell.

HEFFNER: What about the appeal to people's emotion when you may not be aligning on the fact, right?

That seemed to be a pervasive theme in how some communities approached vaccine skeptics.

But that's not the only example of this, where the emotion transcends the data.

BLOOMFIELD: Absolutely.

I think it's a mistake to over rely on facts.

We've known so many facts about evolution and climate change for many, many, many years, but we still have people who are skeptical, right, of what we would consider to be scientific consensus on those facts?

So just giving people facts is not really enough.

We've reached in a lot of sense saturation on people's understanding of the facts.

So what can we do instead to reach people on that information?

Instead of just saying facts, we might want to pair those facts with emotional connections, talking to people about things happening in their neighborhood, talking about objects of care or shared values, things people have in common.

Those are ways to connect the importance of a topic to someone that's not just simply restating facts that they might already know or doesn't connect with them on that human level, I'm thinking, for example, about, climate change.

Some groups that I've studied in my research think about climate science as antithetical to their faith.

So we can't just connect with them on facts if it's something that's rooted so deeply in their world, worldview and their ideology.

So how can you instead maybe connect on the value of charity or the value of justice, right?

Or the importance of caring for others as a way to help them see the truth of climate change?

HEFFNER: What did you conclude were the most effective stories?

Storytelling strategies that move the needle that may have opened people's minds?

BLOOMFIELD: In terms of competing with a scientific skeptical stories.

I found that stories should be more specific and concrete.

So thinking about concrete characters, making concrete actions, inviting audience members to see themselves as characters in the story, specific examples and scopes, finding common values, things like that.

And as I said, not over-relying on the science.

But I also say in addition to being concrete, you know, think about the audience, think about the specific context and think about the specific goal of the communication.

So it's not going to be a one size fits all best story, unfortunately.

Story should also be adaptive to the particular situation, audience and circumstances.

So in addition to adding some of those specific elements, I also encourage science communicators to reflect on strategies that maybe you do need, for example, a big scope to emphasize the importance of something, or the global impact of something.

And maybe other times, um, you want content that is still, you know, very science specific.

So it's really going to depend on the specific situation, but largely the advice is to add some more specifics into the stories we tell.

HEFFNER: That's helpful.

So I made an allusion to combining, conflating associating climate change, evolution vaccination, and COVID-19.

You are saying if you want to be an effective storyteller, whether it's as a science writer, a researcher, an academic, maybe you're a playwright or maybe you're an advocate for an NGO, if you are combining these things, even if you're saying that climate change is causing extreme weather events and you're associating it with both more problematic hurricanes, superstorms, and also drought in extreme heat like that is creating a more complicated picture of a problem.

Am I reading this correctly and saying, at first blush, focus on one of these four things, and even within one of these four things, maybe focus on one thing?

BLOOMFIELD: Yeah.

I think the more you can narrow it down, it, it does create a more concise, concrete, and specific narrative.

So I think that's a great place to start.

And then you might think then how can I spin that out into then talking about drought?

Or how can I then spin out extreme heat means that we're getting more bugs and insects, right?

That wouldn't otherwise live right.

In those kinds of temperatures and get exposure to more diseases, right?

So I think you can start with that nugget, you're exactly right, of that narrative.

And then it opens up narrative opportunities to spin that out into larger, more abstract scopes.

HEFFNER: And what was in the process of hearing all these stories?

I have to ask you, from the book or not from the book, what's the most interesting story you've heard as an explanation of science?

Or even if it wasn't introduced that way?

What are some examples of just the most impactful stories on you as a communications expert and as a human being?

You've gone through a lot of stories now in the process of writing this.

So what resonated with you the most?

BLOOMFIELD: I can think of a few.

One was the intergovernmental panel on climate change, which is famous for releasing its reports that aggregates climate science from around the world.

A very broad, abstract story has started to publish individual scientists' profiles.

So instead of the hundreds of people who aren't even named on these reports contributing to them, they've started to publish scientists in specific locations interacting with members of the public, interacting with communities and talking to them about climate.

So for me, that was a really good way of what I call in the book of telescoping, right?

Thinking about these larger impacts, but also on the ground, who are these scientists, these unnamed people, you know, do they have faces, right?

Do they have experiences, they have lives, they have interactions with people they communicate?

So really putting faces right to oftentimes this nameless kind of faceless entity of the IPCC, I thought was extremely impactful.

And I think I talk about them as a positive, uh, story in the conclusion.

And then another one that really resonated with me was the Centers for Disease Control put out a comic book about children as heroes, and the fight against infectious diseases.

So really thinking about adding the superhero element to vaccination, I thought was really leaning in right to these narrative features in order to reach a population about the importance of getting vaccinated.

So, those are just two examples that come to mind that really resonated with me about how we can really adopt strong narrative features to communicate scientific information.

HEFFNER: As you look at the myriad of crises and challenges facing us domestically and geopolitically.

In the book, you document some of these, climate, in our water, the Flint crisis back in 2014.

What are the overwrought overtold stories, and what are the under told unexplored stories?

If you're giving people strategies, again, in a diverse cross-section of interdisciplinary leaders to tell their stories or to chronicle other folks' journeys, what do you think is overkill at this point?

And what is most needed?

BLOOMFIELD: Yeah, it's a really great question, and I talk about in the book a term called Productive Rival stories.

And these are stories that open up the ways that the stories that science is currently telling is not really working right for larger populations.

So, to sort of flip the order and talk about the stories that we need, I think we need more stories from diverse storytellers, from indigenous communities, marginalized populations.

Speaking of the Flint water crisis, part of the reason that crisis has gone on for so long is that community members, particularly folks who are in low income neighborhoods, folks who identified as mothers were not being heard and were not being seen as legitimate, voices in this conversation about public health.

They weren't seen as experts and folks who could contribute knowledge.

Similarly, oftentimes, indigenous knowledges have been excluded from reports on climate change.

And that is changing, as I talk about in the book where the IPCC is starting to incorporate that more, but more can be done to incorporate those voices that have different forms of knowledge that we might not traditionally consider, within the bounds of mainstream or institutionalized scientific knowledge, but are still extremely valuable.

In terms of stories that are overtold, I want to see less stories that are just about maybe individual, scientists leading a lab.

Maybe it's a white man, maybe it's someone who is already famous, we've already heard from a lot.

I want more variety of voices, and I want less stories that say that there's some technology just on the horizon that's going to solve all our problems.

And we don't need to change anything.

I don't think we can sit around and just keep waiting for some new technology, to configure our way out of these crises, we need more stories about community activism, folks on the ground, grassroots movements, diverse voices in communities, and that moral element too of justice in all these issues.

HEFFNER: I would like you to expound on the moral question.

BLOOMFIELD: Yeah.

HEFFNER: The idea of thinking about scientific discovery and conclusions from a moral lens is that the way of the future?

Is that the language and the discourse that's going to solve our problems?

Or can that be more of a problematic approach?

BLOOMFIELD: I think it's definitely a perspective that still gets pushback, that we want to think of science as this pure objective pursuit of knowledge that's separate from the world it's analyzing.

But I think in our interconnected world that's just a position that's less and less attainable, and less desirable.

We want a science that's attuned to the needs of the world, attuned to the needs of people, attuned to disproportionate impacts, attuned to the potential negative or harmful implications of some scientific decisions.

So I think we need less technological determinism that science and technology can solve all these problems and embracing more of that human element.

There's a great quote from a rhetorician, Kenneth Burke, who said there's nothing more human than a scientific laboratory.

In a lot of ways that's true.

We humans create this way of separating ourselves and studying ourselves in a way that other animals do not.

Right?

So I think embracing that human element, that moral dimension, the impacts of the work that we do and the decisions we make is integral to building a better society.

HEFFNER: And in the minutes we have left, I want to talk about scientific exploration discovery akin to what you said about the next experiment, miracle drug.

You don't want to see those stories.

They probably- BLOOMFIELD: I want to see less of those stories.

HEFFNER: Well, it gets at this point, which is the fact that the folks with the masses of resources of investment power in this country are frankly very obsessed with innovation that is not going to serve a large constituency of people.

Just as most folks are not going to buy a Tesla car, most folks are not going to get the Neuralink, whatever Tesla is working on now.

Most folks are not going to be sent up in Bezos's ship.

I think that there nevertheless is a lot of science communication focused on those individuals and how they're deploying their funds to innovate.

The counter argument to this is Starlink and Musk's internet service that, if all cable dropped dead or wires were cut under the oceans, Musk would probably have a backup system for us to keep the internet going.

But other areas of their investments and the most high profile ones are not that tangibly related to people, and yet they get a ton of coverage.

BLOOMFIELD: Yeah.

Well, I think your last point about media coverage is important because the media tells us what to think about what is important, what's valued, what's newsworthy, and people want to hear about fun new discoveries.

They're interesting.

There's something novel people instinctively grab a hold of and want to learn more about that information.

On a deeper level, I don't think the future of our planet, or whether we all have internet or not, should be beholden to the actions of a few individuals who've managed to amass a ton of resources.

That should be something that we're collectively, putting resources and funds behind as a society.

Of course, if folks are doing positive things, with their money, all the better.

But these should be things baked into creating a good society as opposed to hoping that folks who have amassed the resources to do so do things positively with that money.

I agree that I'd like more focus to be off of those types stories and more about people on the ground and, and the resources that they need, and how we can build a better society to support everybody.

HEFFNER: As you approach your work and research, how has the reaction to Story V. Science impacted the way you want to think about your own storytelling and your own research going forward?

BLOOMFIELD: Oh, that's a really great question.

Yeah.

I want to help create more diversity in science and science communicators.

I'm working at my university to develop a minor and a certificate in science communication, so folks in the sciences learning that here can also learn communication skills.

I'd like to have the tools I develop in the book be publicly accessible to folks to reflect on their own storytelling ability.

And I want to just do more research in this area and how we can turn some of the theories about narrative into these practical, really applicable useful skills for folks.

HEFFNER: And, and more specifically, as we anticipate the next high profile storytelling, what comes after Oppenheimer?

That was a story about science, based on a nonfiction book on Oppenheimer.

What are we most primed to create next?

What do you think should be kind of the movement-building in science literature that is capable of creating generational and cultural change in ways to address problems?

It seems to me that representations of science in art probably have more staying power than a single study or work of nonfiction by a scholar.

BLOOMFIELD: Yeah.

And I think Oppenheimer's a really great example because in a lot of ways that movie follows what I would say is advice in the book, which is to focus on an individual and follow that mind through the scientific process.

But instead of the story of Oppenheimer, right?

And these great white men of history, what about the communities in Japan who were affected by these decisions?

I didn't read the book, so I don't know.

But that movie really cuts out a lot of those moral implications of those scientific decisions.

So I think I would want the flip side right of that story as well and diving deep into communities who are impacted and also stories of hope, how we can grow together, to use science to enact change.

Stories about, people who mobilize change.

I know there's documentaries about Greta Thunberg and thinking about folks who are making a difference in their communities as opposed to just figures like Oppenheimer.

HEFFNER: I think one of the deep insights in that film though, and I don't know if this will be carried by the public.

I'll get your reaction and then we have to close is that the counterproliferation, downsizing nuclear weapons or even eliminating nuclear weapons, that any movement in that direction looked at with suspicion as a result of the investigation into Oppenheimer post-Manhattan Project, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And certainly if you look at America's buildup of nuclear weapons, from the Cold War through the present, that Oppenheimer's treatment dictated a lot of the course of that buildup.

And had he been treated differently, then we may have been downsizing nuclear weapons and not building as many as one civilization can.

BLOOMFIELD: Absolutely.

I think his was an important story to tell, but it is just one story.

Right?

And it's a story we've seen a lot in the media already.

And even though there are important implications there, I'm interested in what's that other side of the story, or who are other people- HEFFNER: Your point about the Japanese as well taken.

I just think in the climate of nuclear deterrence that we've come to accept as our status quo.

That film gave people a lens that it was possible that we could have taken a different direction around WMDs.

And we did not.

Alas, Emma, we're out of time.

I urge folks to check out Emma Bloomfield's Science V. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators.

Thank you for your time and insight today, Emma.

BLOOMFIELD: Thank you so much.

It was a pleasure.

HEFFNER: Please visit The Open Mind website at thirteen.org/openmind to view this program online, or to access over 1,500 other interviews.

And do check us out on Twitter and Facebook at @OpenMindTV for updates on future programming.

Continuing production of The Open Mind has been made possible by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Angelson Family Foundation, Robert and Kate Niehaus Foundation, Grateful American Foundation, Robert S. Kaplan Foundation, Draper Foundation, and Ploughshares Fund.