1. INTRODUCCIÓN
1.1. Comportamiento de la morbilidad materna extrema
Understanding how scientists construct citizens is important, not just in terms of
understanding those elements of the assemblage, but it is also critical in any attempt to understand the patterns of public engagement of science with citizens. Constructions of publics and models of communication with them are often inextricable (Maranta et al., 2003; Irwin and Michael, 2003). As Jack Stilgoe puts it:
Studies of technology have suggested that technologies necessarily embed
assumptions about users (Woolgar, 1991) (and sociologists embed assumptions about readers (Latour, 1988)), constructing their particular public. So experts, when dealing with questions of public engagement, might be seen as (re-)constructing their publics as they (re-)construct science-in-public.
Stilgoe, 2007 The social construction of publics by experts14 is emphasised by Maranta et al. (2003, p. 157) who describe experts as “lay person makers” and talk of the “imagined lay persons” they make, arguing that “experts cannot set up imagined lay persons without having a concept of how to communicate with lay persons”, reinforcing the observation that the construction of the public is inextricably bound up with both characterisations of their knowledge and modes of engagement with them.
14I acknowledge that assuming a simple public/expert dichotomy ignores the way in which the lines between these categories are often blurred (particularly when considering the role of new social movements, pressure groups and advisory committees; Irwin and Michael, 2003), however, the purpose here is to consider how publics, public knowledge and interactions with those publics are conceptualised by people occupying a range of ‘expert’ positions in science.
The literature on the scientific community’s construction of “the public” is dominated by critiques of the “deficit model” (Irwin and Wynne, 1996; Sturgis and Allum, 2001). The deficit model of science communication attributes a deficit of scientific knowledge to the public (Bauer, 2008). The model suggests that human inadequacies limit the public’s capacity to be effectively involved in complex decisions. Some scholars, clearly of a deficit model mindset, express doubts about whether the public understands significant concepts such as “uncertainty” and the nature of science as an incremental process (e.g., Brooks and Johnson 1991; but see, e.g., Frewer, Howard, and Shepherd 1998 for counterclaims), or point to deficiencies in the knowledge and reasoning abilities of laypersons (Slovic, Fischhoff, and Lichtenstein 1982; Earle and Cvetkovich 1995).
According to deficit model thinking, the extent of the deficit needs to be investigated by surveys and questionnaires of science that the public “should know”, and the proposed solution is to increase efforts in science education to reduce the deficit.
The British Royal Society became very concerned with the deficit in public knowledge about science in the 1980s, and in the Bodmer Report produced in 1985, attributed the perceived lack of support for science to this deficit. The Royal Society assumed that more scientific knowledge would be the driver of more positive attitudes towards science, hence the axiom of the public understanding of science (PUS) movement “the more you know, the more you love it”.
The traditional view is that decisions regarding technical issues should be left in the hands of experts and scientists. Environmental scientist Ralph Perhac (1996), for example, suggests that environmental policy based on the public’s conceptualisation of risk (which has been shown to differ from that used by risk assessors; e.g. Renn 1992) fails to adequately protect fundamental human rights to health and liberty. The former Director General of Legislative and Regulatory Affairs for the Department of the Environment in Canada, John Moffet (1996) warns that policies involving the public must balance the desire to foster legitimacy and support for decisions (e.g., about risk priority setting) with concerns to avoid priorities being driven by “the crisis of the day.”
Some scholars have added that as well as ignorance, scientists sometimes construct the public as having a deficit of rationality, and other factors may limit the potential for the public to contribute to complex policy decisions related to their attitudes, beliefs, and motivations (Ravetz 1986; McCallum and Santos 1997). John Durant (1999) is concerned with a deficit of mutual trust between scientists and citizens and the lack of active public participation in decision-making processes regarding science and
technology.
Burningham et al. (2007) in their account of how industrial scientists construct publics and public knowledge found that their industrial scientist interviewees generally
interpreted public concerns about factory safety as issues of trust rather than simply scientific ignorance. However, rather than responding by trying to build trust through engagement or dialogue, the interviewees constructed the lack of trust itself as irrational and identified the appropriate response as education to correct
misperceptions, effectively using the deficit model in the sense that a ‘deficit of trust’
could be remedied by education.
Burningham et al. also found that when they interviewed scientists working in industry, the scientists defended the perceived deficits of knowledge by arguing that not only are people not interested in acquiring knowledge, but indeed that they have no need to do so. This range of justifications of ignorance raises interesting questions about the impact of this version of the deficit model. The “classic” deficit model emphasising education, at least leaves open some communication with the public. In contrast, the way of thinking illustrated here—”they don’t know, but why should they?”—implicitly legitimates lack of communication and discourages public engagement with industrial science. Alternatively, and more positively, these accounts can be likened to critiques of the deficit model which point out that ignorance may be an active choice; people will only seek knowledge if it is in their interest to do so (Michael, 1996). Indeed,
Burningham et al.’s overall conclusion was that communication by industrial scientists with publics focuses on downstream risks, impacts and preferences (associated with products and factories) and there is little sense of the desirability of engaging with publics about broader questions about the “values, assumptions, visions and vested interests” (Wilsdon and Willis, 2004, p. 18) that underpin company activities. Indeed industrial science constructed the public largely as either “consumers” or “neighbours.”
Accordingly every contact between companies and publics was framed as seeking information or expressing concerns about either the product or the factory, requiring reassurance more than engagement. Consumers and neighbours were not regarded as the source of “facts,” or broader values, “wisdom” or insights which might inform company thinking and practice (please see Irwin and Michael, 2003, p. 8).
Nisbet and Scheufele (2009) detail how prevailing deficit model assumptions have led scientists to use science media, in particular popular science outlets such as Scientific American or the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) programme NOVA, to educate the public about the technical details of scientific matters which are in dispute. The facts are assumed to speak for themselves and to be interpreted by all citizens in similar ways. If the public does not accept or recognise these facts, then the failure in transmission is blamed on journalists, “irrational” public beliefs, or both (Bauer, 2008;
Bauer et al., 2007; Nisbet and Goidel, 2007; Scheufele, 2007). Also, as Irwin and Wynne (1996) identify, when scientists emphasise what is wrong with the public, they
ignore the possibility that their own communication efforts may be part of the problem (Irwin and Wynne, 1996).
The assumed use of the deficit model by scientists is borne out by empirical research into scientists’ attitudes to the public’s understanding of their research. In a survey conducted by People Science and Policy with funding from the Royal Society,
Research Councils UK, and the Wellcome Trust (Royal Society, 2006); when asked to respond on the degree to which their “research is too specialised to make much sense to the non-specialist public” on a five-point scale anchored by “strongly agree” (1) and
“strongly disagree” the mean response was 3.54 (SD = 1.11). Younger respondents (r
= -0.10, p > 0.01), men (r = -0.09, p > 0.01), and those in engineering (r = -0.12, p >
0.01), physics (r = -0.09, p > 0.01) and math (r = -0.18, p > 0.01) were more likely to view their research as too specialised. Those in medicine (r = 0.19, p > 0.01) and environmental science (r = 0.07, p > 0.05) appeared to view their work as more accessible to the general public (approximate n = 1,475, weighted).
Indeed scientific research is complex and technical and several authors have pointed to the problem that standards needed for evaluation of evidence underpinning scientific knowledge claims are beyond the reach of non-experts (Hardwig 1985, Bingle and Gaskell 1994, Norris 1995). And an expert in one discipline of science can be a non-expert, indeed a complete novice, in another—as Martin Rees put it, speaking at the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy in December 2011 “We’re all depressingly
‘lay’ outside our specialisms” (2011). This presents difficulties for scientists. The Royal Society’s motto, Nullius in verba, is Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it”. The idea of sceptical scientists proving everything for themselves by experiment and accepting nothing on authority worked in the seventeenth century when an educated gentleman could actually try out everything for himself, or at least be a ‘virtual witness’, the term for the readers of Robert Boyles’s texts, which were themselves constructed in a manner which was agreed to be reliable, and sufficient to produce in a reader’s mind such an image of an experimental scene as obviated the necessity for either direct witness or replication. Nowadays science is so complex; requires such huge resources in terms of capital, equipment and personnel—that in effect even a scientist in one field has to take on authority almost everything else in science. That is why Martin Rees in his Reith lecture in 2010 on The Scientific Citizen saw a role for: “scientific
commentators and critics, such as the best scientific journalists, because they in fact have a network that spreads across different subjects and they can calibrate the quality of work in different fields”.
Returning to the notion of scientist’s relationship with non-experts, Wendy Parsons, former Deputy Director of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation (CSIRO)'s National Awareness Program, points out that science finds it hard to accept democracy’s apparently irrational forces of popular belief, which means that scientists tend to avoid engagement in the public policy debate, often out of fear of having their findings given the same value as popular prejudice (Parsons, 2001).
Practitioners of science, such as Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, claim to work out the properties of a rationally understandable world “to protect ourselves from the irrational tendencies that still beset humanity” (Weinberg 1996, p. 15). US environmental consultant Gary Rahl (1996) in his work on risk reduction through public participation in environmental decisions found that sponsors in the US Navy were wary of accepting binding votes and giving away all of their power to public participants in case this results in the compulsory implementation of a decision based on emotion or prejudice.
This fear of an emotionally prejudiced public is echoed by Carpignano et al. (1990), who describes the argument that public life has been transformed by a massive process of commodification of culture in particular, and by a form of communication increasingly based on emotionally charged images rather than on rational discourses, such that political discourse has been degraded to the level of entertainment, and cultural consumerism has been substituted for democratic participation.
Most recently, discussion in science communication has focused on the need to move public engagement “upstream” (Wilsdon and Willis, 2004): enabling public debate to take place at the development stages of science and technology, rather than later on when a technology is approaching exploitation. (Although in light of findings that show it is not risk per se that concerns the public (Gaskell et al., 2004), many researchers fear that upstream engagement mean their roles will be relegated to purely technical ones.) Most of the debate has concerned the way in which decisions are made in the public sector, even though recent work has highlighted the extent to which science-based industry plays a key role in innovations in science and technology: see for example discussions of the “triple helix” (Etzkowitz, 2003) and “mode 2” knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994). For the advocates of public engagement, there are clear normative reasons why industry should engage with “the public” as science-based industry is the source of most of the developments that will affect people’s lives. Given the erosion of demarcation between university science and industrial science, social science research on industrial science is crucial for developing new understandings of publics and science. As the inclusion of lay perspectives is increasingly thought critical in achieving socially robust knowledge (Gibbons, 1999), the question of the extent to which this is recognised and acted upon within industry science is important.