This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 24 Aug 2012, by Todd Suomela.
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24 Aug 12
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Gave a talk last Friday in Washington DC for members of the US Global Change Research Program. The statutory mandate of USGCRP, an inter-agency office within the Executive Branch, is to supervise "a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change."
I was one of a series of researchers who have been invited to make presentations on the science of science communication (SSC) to USGCRP. It's heartening to see policymakers taking steps to integrate SSC into science-informed decisionmaking.
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1. What the problem isn't, and what it really is. The first was the need to conceive of the controversy that surrounds climate change (and a number of other risk issues) as rooted not in generic constraints on human rationality but rather in the species of motivated reasoning associated with cultural cognition.
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2. Go local. The second point concerned the value in exploiting local decisionmaking settings as venues for promoting open-minded engagement with scientific evidence relating to climate change. When members of a community address issues of climate-change adaptation -- ones relating to rising sea levels, increased incidence of hurricanes, and depletion of water and other natural resources -- their decisionmaking is much more consequential for their individual lives. They also talk with others (neighbors, local businesses, regional utilities and like providers) who are comparably situated, who they know and are comfortable with, and with whom they share a common idiom.
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3. Use genuinely evidence-based communication strategies. The aim of SSC, of course, is to harness empirical observation and measurement to promote our collective interest in policies informed by the best available scientific evidence. But it's a mistake to think empirical observation and measurement end in social scientists' labs.
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