Adam Shapiro writes:

It’s been nearly 30 years—a generation!—since professional science communication as a field began to seriously push back against what’s been called the knowledge deficit model (sometimes just called the “deficit model.”) (See “The Trust Fallacy,” July–August 2021.) That model describes a way of thinking about people’s understanding and acceptance of scientific knowledge, supposing that the greatest barrier to scientific literacy was a lack—or deficit—of information about a topic. If only people better understood evolution, the thinking went, they would stop being creationists. If they better understood the biochemistry of toxic pollutants, they would support environmentalism. If only we taught people more science, they would soak it up like sponges. This model was probably the dominant science communication paradigm in the English-speaking world for much of the Cold War era. And it took advantage of Cold War anxieties about a science “gap” between NATO and the Soviet’s allies to focus on pragmatic industrial and technocratic applications of scientific knowledge.

By the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, around the time that the deficit model was first named and criticized, science communication researchers began to point out that the deficit model paradigm wasn’t working as well as desired. While it may have inspired many people to become scientists, it also pushed away a lot of people whose interest in nature was not part of their career path. Also lingering in the minds of many American scientists at the time was the stunned realization that creationism was still widespread in the United States, brought to greater prominence through highly publicized “creation science” trials during the 1980s.

In the wake of this time of change came what we might call a science engagement model. (I take this term from former AAAS CEO Alan Leshner’s recent advice to scientists: “Don’t just explain: engage.” But I don’t mean for this term to be confused for engagement metrics that are commonly used by social media managers. Rather, engagement suggests the interactive and iterative nature of this kind of science communication.) This engagement model is probably the most common way of thinking about science communication at the moment. It emphasizes sustained relationship-building between scientists and their publics rather than the one-way flow of information from experts to audience. (See “How Climate Science Could Lead to Action,” January–February 2020.)

The other defining characteristic is an obligatory-seeming, almost ritualistic disparagement of the deficit model. Even in 2021, Leshner finds it necessary to invoke it as the epitome of what we’re not supposed to be doing. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report Communicating Science Effectively, published in 2017, practically begins with a section titled “Moving Beyond the ‘Deficit Model’ of Science Communication.” Even though a generation of science writers has come into a field that never thought the deficit model was good to begin with, it’s still talked about with such frequency as if to ensure that we never go back to that dark age.

But at moments of transformation, professionals start to look a bit less mythologically at their history and stop taking their methods for granted. This process started to happen five years ago at the beginning of the Trump Administration, with the science-themed protests that developed at that time and the debates over whether science could be separated from politics. It has come to a rapid boil in the world of COVID-19. [Continue reading…]