Speaking to the mind and heart: Emotions in science communication
Effective science communication goes beyond facts, engaging emotions to connect with audiences. Research shows curiosity and awe are key in fostering interest and understanding.
When communicating science, the primary goals are clarity, accuracy, and informing your audience. But is that enough? In short, it's not. In fact, beyond providing clear and accurate information, fostering audience engagement is essential – and one of the most effective ways to achieve this is by tapping into emotions.
Research shows that simply conveying facts is not enough for successful science communication. To truly connect with your audience, you need to appeal not just to their intellect but also to their hearts. This can be challenging, as each of us—both the communicators and the listeners—comes with our own unique set of experiences, values, and worldviews. These factors significantly influence how we process emotions and information.
Cognitive science offers valuable insights into how the human brain's wiring and cognitive abilities shape how people receive and interpret scientific communication. However, as one research article emphasises, the real question is not just how audiences receive scientific messages – it is how communicators deliver those messages. Failing to consider the social and cognitive factors that shape communication makes reaching and engaging the audience significantly harder. Conservationist Anne Toomey highlights this challenge in her paper:
"decades of research in multiple fields have demonstrated the limited effectiveness of scientific evidence for shifting social norms, creating uptake of new behaviours, or even generating effective solutions. Thus, instead of placing the blame on the so-called "receivers" of evidence, [insights from cognitive sciences] can help us to understand that information will generally be processed sub-optimally in the brain, particularly in complex scenarios […]. Most attitudes and behaviours regarding conservation decision-making are not based on the rational evaluation of evidence but determined instead by a host of contextual, social, and cultural factors and values. Therefore, providing additional information – even in accessible formats – is not likely to lead to significant changes".
In other words, piling facts upon facts rarely changes people's perceptions of specific topics or behaviours. What does work, however, is bringing emotions into the conversation.
Among the emotions that most commonly arise when engaging with scientific topics, curiosity and awe – or wonder – seem to stand out as particularly powerful. Awe, in particular, has been described as an "epistemic emotion", meaning that "it may be related to our knowledge and understanding of the world" and "may promote people to seek out more information about the awe-inspiring event" as researcher Jonathon McPhetres has argued in a research article.
Moreover, awe and curiosity are deeply interconnected. They reinforce one another, sparking interest in science and significantly enhancing the learning process. So, to cultivate these emotions in your audience, consider going beyond simply presenting facts. Instead, share the human context behind a scientific discovery, or the personal motivations that fuelled your interest in a particular topic. By doing so, you create a connection that engages both the intellect and the heart—an invaluable skill in science communication.
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