Lab Rats and News Hounds
Story is ubiquitous.
Story is fundamental.
Story is powerful.
Story is ubiquitous. We all have stories. You have a story about where you come from, a story about your family, and a story about how you became a scientist. If you’re religious, you have a story about God. If you’re an atheist, you have a story about the non-existence of God. Regardless of where you’re from, you have a story about how your country started, and what it stands for today. History is a story. Science is a story.
Science is a special kind of story, in two ways. First, it makes true predictions about the future. Second, when we test those predictions, the test always turns out the same way, whether we believe the story or not. So science is unique among stories, but make no mistake, it is still a story.
Why do we have so many stories? Because story is fundamental. If you’ve given a talk at a conference, presented a poster, written a paper, or even just shared your results at a lab meeting, you’ve likely heard a standard piece of advice: make your data tell a story. That’s because if you just presented your data in columns of numbers or collections of micrographs or whatever else the raw output from your experiments is, nobody would be able to understand it. Instead, you need to graph it or explain it in a way that organizes the results coherently. That organization is always a story.
Everything from Figure 1 on your poster to the Materials and Methods section of your paper is a story. They may be told well or poorly, but they’re all trying to be stories. That’s because the human mind operates exclusively on narrative. We literally cannot think without stories.
As a result, story is powerful. It speaks to us in the way we’re built to understand. All wars throughout history, including the ones going on around the world right now, are conflicts over whose story will be believed. All human progress comes from stories, too: there’s a story about powered flight, a story about wireless communication, a story about infection and antibiotics. And the stories you believe about yourself define your identity. We are all made of stories.
This is your brain on everything.
My job is telling stories about science. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that this work, science journalism, is in a weird place right now. We are awash in vast quantities of misinformation and disinformation about science. I draw a distinction here: misinformation is the general category of stories that are presented as true but are in fact wrong, while disinformation is the subcategory that’s wrong on purpose, usually in service of a political, ideological, or financial motive. Regardless of the terms, both things now abound, and as a result we have large swaths of the population believing falsehoods about the nature of reality.
How did we get here? To explain that, I have to tell you a story.
I became a science journalist in 1997, before many of you were born. At that time, science journalism operated in the same vertical, unidirectional pattern that it had followed for most of the 20th century. When I entered the field, every news outlet had a web site, but none of them knew why. The primary business still relied on putting ink to paper, or broadcasting audio or video signals over the airwaves.
Scientists did their work in the ivory tower, and were actively discouraged from communicating directly with “the public.” This was an unwritten but strictly enforced rule. In a now infamous incident, Carl Sagan was actually denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences, despite his groundbreaking research, because the old farts who ran that organization at the time felt he was a “popularizer,” and therefore shouldn’t be allowed into their exclusive treehouse. That extreme of silliness had subsided by 1997, but the general bias still lingered.
Instead, the revered gods of science were expected to communicate their results to the public through a priesthood of science journalists. These individuals often had backgrounds in science, and could translate new findings into compelling stories for a broad audience. Those stories went out through print, radio, and television media that operated as broadcasts; readers, listeners, and viewers rarely got an opportunity to make public responses, and were expected to receive the news passively.
That system certainly had flaws, but it also had a couple of major strengths. In particular, it marginalized misinformation and disinformation, while presenting a curated set of science stories that tended to moderate and unify public understanding of research.
Things have changed. Now, anyone can publish anything to a global audience online, in formats that look as credible as the sites of major news outlets, at least superficially. That’s made it trivial to push propaganda, and here we are. While that certainly makes social media a hellscape for anyone scientifically literate, the stakes are actually much higher.
The rise of scientific misinformation is an existential threat to humanity.
No, I’m not being melodramatic. We now face serious global problems that we can’t fix in a fog of collective delusion. We’re not going to be able to address climate change while powerful people deny its existence, we’ll keep wiping out species and ecosystems as long as powerful interests can say it doesn’t matter, and we’re certainly not going to be ready for the next pandemic while much of the public thinks the previous one was a hoax.
Though the pandemic made the misinformation problem worse, it predates that by more than a decade. Indeed, by the 2010s, science journalists were collectively fretting over this issue, and most of us realized that it was our profession’s job to try to address it. The prevailing theory was that the reason misinformation and disinformation gain traction online is that people aren’t aware of the facts, which makes them easy to mislead. That came to be known as the “information deficit” model.
The obvious solution to an information deficit is to provide information, and so we started writing “mythbusting” articles. These often took a format such as “Ten Myths about the Flu Vaccine,” in which we’d state a myth in a boldface heading (“Myth: You can get the flu from the vaccine”), then spend a paragraph of two explaining why the myth is wrong. That, and other fact-dump formats, became quite common for awhile across the media landscape. We did a great job filling that information deficit.
And we failed. Social scientists who investigated science communication strategies discovered that the mythbusting pieces often had the perverse effect of reinforcing the very myths they were supposed to debunk. People would read (or perhaps skim) such a piece, and then retain the boldface headings rather than the paragraph-long debunkings. While that might be fixed with different formatting, there were a couple of more fundamental problems with this approach.
In an ironic twist that isn’t lost on us, our own model of the problem was based on bad science. It turns out that people latch onto misinformation and disinformation not because they don’t know better, but because the propaganda tells a better story. I don’t mean it’s truer, or better for the individual or for humanity, of course; it’s the opposite of all those things. I mean that, evaluated solely as a narrative, successful propaganda works better than a lot of fact-dumping science journalism. It gives the audience something they’re not getting from fact-bound pieces.
Maybe it simplifies something that previously seemed complicated, making them feel smarter, or maybe it aligns better with their own ideology or biases, or is just more entertaining. The unifying theme of successful propaganda is that it tells a good story. It feels like it ought to be true.
There’s also another problem with mythbusting. Remember when I said our identities are made of the stories we believe? If I tell you that one of those stories is wrong, I’m attacking who you are as a person. People who’ve become deeply invested in some thread of misinformation - the hard-core antivaccination believers, for example - won’t just ignore efforts to correct them, they’ll harden their positions in the face of such challenges.
So how do we fix this? The answer is simple, but not easy. We need to tell better stories.
This will have to be an all-hands effort, and I expect everyone here to participate. No, I don’t expect you all to become science journalists. Full-time science communication is a precarious, poorly-paid job, and if there’s anything I can possibly say that would discourage you from pursuing it, act as if I’ve said it.
Instead, I urge each of you to start communicating your science to as broad an audience as you can, within your own abilities. The Academy won’t ban you for it anymore, and in fact many institutions now strongly encourage their researchers to interact with the public. Do so. Don’t worry if you’re not comfortable in the spotlight, just focus on the audiences you already have.
If you’re on social media, you should quit. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, then talk about your research on those sites. Tell your story to your online “friends.” Show them that science is done by people, and show them how that looks.
If you’re not on social media, good for you. Don’t start. You nonetheless have an audience. When you see a neighbor in the grocery store, or chat with other parents while waiting to pick up the kids at daycare, or get together with your extended family for the holidays, talk about what you do.
Whether online or in person, counter misinformation and disinformation as you find it. Talk to the person who’s propagating it (assuming they’re not a bot), and find out why they believe it. Try to separate the propaganda from the individual, and correct what you can.
However you choose to tell science stories, I’ll leave you with a warning. Story is powerful, but story is hard. If people’s eyes glaze over when you explain your work, try reworking your explanation. Practice your story, then test it out, then refine it, then repeat. Keep trying to get better at this, because the future will belong, as it always has, to those who tell the better stories.
This post is based on a presentation I gave at the 2024 American Society for Virology meeting in Columbus, OH.