Inspired by Sciblings Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbets’ recent piece in Science, which has sparked a fair amount of discussion (see Bora’s post for the best link roundup, as always), I’ve been trying to put my finger on precisely why the concept of framing vaguely troubles me. I think it can be distilled down into a question. You’re making a presentation on a complicated scientific issue, and you’re advocating a specific solution or point of view. What is the most preferable outcome?
- Most people now understand the science but still disagree with your position.
- Most people now agree with your position, but still don’t really understand the science.
Or, to put it another way, would the first outcome be considered a failure of framing? Would the second be considered a success?
Any attempt at scientific discourse with non-scientists faces the dual challenge of eliciting interest – engagement – and improving understanding, and it’s trivially true that success at either requires that you take the concerns and knowledge of your audience into account. If my family ask me about my research, I’m not going to get very far if I sit them in front of one of my conference presentations (when I showed him my thesis, one of my brothers looked at the abstract and joked that he understood two words of the title: ‘New’ and ‘Zealand’). Likewise, if you want to encourage peoples’ attention and concern over what you consider to be an important issue, you’re going to get much further if you are aware of, and understand, the sorts of things that generally concern them. In this general sense, even the introduction to a scientific paper is an exercise in framing – you’re trying to describe a problem in a way that makes your attempts to solve it, and hopefully your solution, seem sensible.
However, in the sense it is used by social scientists, and by extension in the current discussion, framing appears to be primarily concerned with the art of engagement – to put it crudely, it is about knowing the right buttons to press to make people sympathetic to your point of view. I’m not saying that this isn’t important; it clearly is, because you can’t explain things to people who are not going to listen to you in the first place. But it does present a dilemma, and a danger, because I can’t help noticing that to be a useful weapon politically, a frame does not necessarily have to contain Starry Night. In fact, many of the frames being thrown around in the public discourse nowadays seem to be somewhat empty, and appear no less (if not more) effective for it. Think of the spurious ‘academic freedom’ or ‘suppressed by the hidebound, liberal-atheist-tree-hugging scientific establishment’ themes which have allowed the ID crowd, and deniers of anthropogenic climate change – to take two topical examples – to prosper, despite not having a real argument to rub together between them. I worry that many people who talk about ‘framing’ seem to use it as shorthand for ‘getting people to instinctively agree with us’; the frame sometimes seems to become more important than the picture within it.
That, then, is the misgiving highlighted by my opening question: ‘successful framing’ is not necessarily synonymous with ‘informed audience’. In more and more cases, there is a certain amount of tension between the desire to inform people, and the urge to persuade them, and as scientists, or at least in contexts where we are speaking as scientists, I think we need to be cautious about sacrificing the former goal in order to expediate the latter. After all, if all you have is a good frame, you’re only winning the debate until your opponents think up a new one themselves.
However, it’s also clear that we can’t avoid framing issues, because like it or not they are part of the modern media environment. Indeed you can’t deny that a frame – or the understanding of how people filter and prejudge the information which a frame represents – is clearly a valuable and effective communication tool. It’s how they’re used which is the issue: nicking some terminology from another scientific hot potato, the debate boils down to, do we concentrate on adaptation, moulding ourselves to fit the current media landscape, as Chris, Matt and others argue? Or do we pursue a mitigation strategy, where we fight to change the media obsession with 15 second soundbites? Probably we need to pursue both, but in either context I would prefer to see frames being used by scientists as vehicles for an idea, and not a means to an end. In fact, channeling the spirit of Carl Sagan’s “Baloney Detection Kit”, I think we need to start helping people become more aware of when they’re being ‘framed’.
Comments (6)