The inimitable @sarakyeo was the guest speaker in our department seminar series today. A

She started by sharing how she came to be a communications scholar: via a circutious route throug oceanography, chemistry, and more. Ultimately, studying microbes and finding people weren't into them led her to #scicomm.

She oriented us to current #scicomm/news media landscape. Grim stats re U.S. public interest in science, sources for sci info, gaps btwn sci and public perceptions, etc.

In transitioning to #scicomm research from #microbialecology, @sarakyeo started out thinking about religiosity and other individual traits that influence people’s engagement with science (b/c audiences not into microbes!). Then, got more interested in disgust.

And then, she became interested in emotions more broadly, and is now more focused on humor as a #scicomm tactic. Got started there with questions of humor and #scicomm through #overlyhonestmethods,
#reviewforscience, and #fieldworkfail.

Through various experiements Yeo et al., have found: Apart from follower counts, emojis & visuals get more engagement; simple, actionable takeaways for #scicomm. (I just this month started trying to use more emojis, on a hunch this was true! Now, citation, baby! )

Also, satire positively predicted likes/RTs, and wordplay also increased likes. While we might want to leverage satire for similar reasons to emojis increase likes, satire is more nuanced and only may be appealing to certain groups, because it always has a target.

It's tricky, because published advice is *to use* humor for #scicomm (e.g. Baram-Tsbari & Lewenstein 2013)...but, we don't actually have evidence to substantiate the advice. And, humor is an ingroup/outgroup thing, says @sarakyeo. It can bring people in or push away.

So Yeo et al. ran all these experiments to test humor and science engagement on Twitter. They used jokes about ions, electrons, and atoms, and modified them for wordplay, anthropomorphism, a combo, and no humor, riffing off this joke: https://doi.org/10.1177/1075547020942512

They looked at a trait known as Need for Humor (want to be close to it <---> want to produce it). Also looked at individual knowledge about science: to get the joke, you have to know enough to recognize it as funny in the context/with the relevant information.

Of course, we want answers: we want to know whether our changes in our approach (e.g., adding more humor) to scicomm can positively influence people’s engagement with/attitudes about science.

In all cases, if the participant found the tweet funny, they were more likely to engage with the tweet. (The experiment structure had an option to respond to the tweet.)

Re knowledge: big diff for wordplay & combo + relevant knowledge vs. no humor and anthro ~> if respondent would be more likely to engage with the tweet. (Yeo et al., 2021, PUS)

Re Need for Humor (NFH) – the funnier you found it, the higher your intention to engage was. But, it did matter if you were someone who scores higher on NFH. Now, we have empirical evidence that using humor can encourage people to engage w/ science!

Then some fielded by @sarakyeo: A question about culturally responsive scicomm that uses humor. SKY: more benign forms of humor don’t have a target, so can be safer. Self-deprecating humor is commonly used, but it also can be used carefully. Try not to undermine own expertise.

Also, "how to respond to irrational viewpoints on sci?": SKY: Repeating misinfo is detrimental, bc it reinforces. People with particular perspectives are already predisposed. Try to connect as people first, not “here’s my scientist hat.” Don't start by immediately disagreeing.

And "What do you think are the biases inherent in social media science communication?" SKY: Tendency to make everything dichotomous, one side or another. Huge issue. We see this in a lot of conversations, not just about science....

....The platforms don’t help this – tend to prioritize short messages, can’t get much nuance for an issue. Tension, too, because one of the things we do too much as scientists is rely on/include too much information.

Fin/ a HUGE thank you to @sarakyeo for the great talk & takeaways!