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How Can Climate Scientists Win Over a Distrustful Public Audience?

When it comes to Climate change there is an ever growing need for scientists who can communicate their findings to the public. Research in WIREs Climate Change explores the important of trust and explores communication strategies climatologists can adopt to win over a distrustful audience.

Jean Goodwin and Michael Dahlstrom examine the need for communication strategies to appeal to two broad types of cognitive processing mechanisms.

In the first, the communicator must display traits like humour, attractiveness, vigorous delivery and likeability that audiences use in determining whom to trust. However this rather shallow strategy is unlikely to win trust in an audience primed to be analytic and critical to the issue.

The second strategy relies on the communicator earning trust by undertaking burdens and commitments and making herself vulnerable in ways an audience can enforce. This vulnerability signals trustworthiness, since the audience can reason that no one would undertake such risks unless they were confident in their arguments. For climate scientists this vulnerability can include engaging with doubtful and dismissive audiences, undertaking burdens of proof to argue with them, empowering audiences to assess the science themselves, admitting error, and focusing on small issues.

“It may seem paradoxical, but climate scientists will earn more trust by being up front about their uncertainties, disagreements and mistakes than by only sharing and insisting upon their certainties,” said Goodwin.