Decades of research say more evidence does not close divides on contested science. Arizona State University’s Dietram A. Scheufele on why the profession keeps ignoring its own findings.
There is a comforting story that science communicators tell themselves when their efforts fall short. The public did not get the message. The numbers were not clear enough. The graph needed better colours. Run it again, louder.
Scheufele has spent nearly thirty years explaining why that story is wrong, and he summarized his main arguments in a recent interview with the European Science Media Hub. On contested issues, giving people more scientific information does not close the gap between them. It can widen it. People do not arrive at a controversy as empty vessels waiting to be filled. They arrive with commitments, and evidence that threatens those commitments tends to make them dig in rather than back down.
Social scientists have a name for the assumption Scheufele is dismantling. They call it the deficit model, the belief that public scepticism is a knowledge shortage and that more information is the cure. Decades of empirical work on motivated reasoning have taken it apart. And yet it remains the operating logic of most press offices, most ministries and most well funded public information campaigns. As Scheufele puts it, the real issue is not knowing. It is connecting knowledge to our values and firmly held belief systems.
Framing is not spin
If more facts are not the lever, what is? Scheufele points to Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 and who showed that identical information travels down different mental pathways depending on how it is presented. Framing has been at the centre of Scheufele’s own research for almost three decades: not what we say, but how we say it, and against which set of values.
This is where his critique becomes uncomfortable for the profession. During the pandemic, a study spanning more than eighty countries found that most official communication was framed around losses, or the negative impacts of people’s refusal to wear masks or get vaccinated. That is almost the exact opposite of what the social science literature recommends. It was not a subtle failure in some parts of the world. It was the dominant global approach, and it was wrong on a point that had been settled in the research for years.
His prescription is short enough to fit on a sticky note. Frame the message around your audience’s values, not your own. He offers a live example from American politics. Conservatives trying to convince their party of the urgency to combat climate change, increasingly talk about global competitiveness and energy independence rather than climate change. The policy destination is identical. The route in is completely different. The question a communicator should be asking is not how do I make you accept my facts, but how do I connect my facts to what you already care about.
That is not manipulation and it is not dishonesty. It is the difference between talking and being heard.
What the pandemic actually exposed
Scheufele’s reading of the Covid years is more bracing than the usual post mortem. Science, he says, was asked to produce policy recommendations at a speed it is simply not designed to work at. Institutions were under pressure to correct claims they knew to be false, such as the suggestion that drinking bleach offered protection, using science they were not yet certain would hold up. When the evidence later shifted, as evidence does, they were left exposed.
The slogan that emerged from those years, just follow the science, is the part he rejects most firmly. Policy is not a downstream output of a laboratory. It is an amalgam of regional values, local preferences and, at best, the strongest available evidence. Pretending otherwise sets an impossible standard and guarantees that every revision looks like a betrayal.
What institutions should be communicating instead, he argues, is the epistemic integrity of the process itself. Not the certainty of any single finding, but the reliability of how findings are produced, tested and revised. That is a harder message to fit into a headline. It is also the only one that survives contact with a changing evidence base.
The audience that matters is not the one applauding
Ask most communicators who they typically reach and they will describe an audience that already turns up. Scheufele calls it the proverbial choir. Every few years a high profile mission generates genuine public enthusiasm, and those crowds are not the ones that worry him.
The people who worry him are the ones who watch science contradict itself in public, coffee is good for you this year and bad for you next year, and read that as proof of unreliability rather than as a self correcting system doing exactly what it is supposed to do. Reaching them is not a messaging exercise. It requires building rapport with communities that are not science adjacent, meeting them on their own ground, and engaging with the concerns they actually hold rather than the ones we wish they held. He calls this the structural priority, and structural is the operative word. It cannot be solved by a campaign.
It also connects to an argument Scheufele has made elsewhere with his UW-Madison colleagues Dominique Brossard and Todd Newman: that on emerging technologies, the public wants in. In their 2020 national survey, only around a quarter of American adults agreed that scientists should be able to do research without consulting the public, while roughly two thirds said the public should have a say in how research and technology get applied. That is not a hostile public. It is a public asking to be treated as a participant rather than a target.
What editors should take from this
Three things, none of them comfortable.
First, stop measuring success by information delivered. Delivery was never the bottleneck.
Second, do the audience work before the message work. If you cannot name the values your readers hold, you are guessing at the frame, and the evidence says you will probably guess loss.
Third, sell the process, not the certainty. Institutions that promise certainty have to break that promise every time the science moves. Institutions that explain how knowledge gets built and corrected have something durable to offer.
Scheufele is not arguing that facts do not matter. He is arguing that facts without a bridge to somebody’s values are inert. That has been true for decades. The research has been sitting there the whole time. The profession simply has not acted on it, which is, fittingly, exactly the problem he describes.
