Poster Session

Ask Dr. Twitter: Characterizing Social Media Claims about Vaccination
Anita Tseng
Stanford University, USA

This study examines the nature of commentary on the social media platform Twitter regarding the controversial issue of vaccination safety, and analyzes these comments for sentiment and the presence of potential misinterpretations of science. The advancement of the Internet has made more science information available to the public. However, new Web technologies allow Internet users to self-publish claims and share them worldwide, increasing the spread of misinformation and erroneous explanations. Social media technologies also allow members of the public to engage in public dialogue about any subject, including contentious topics in science and health. For this study, social media posts from Twitter (“Tweets”) on “vaccination safety” and “vaccination dangers” were collected daily over a seven-month period (n=26,050). A randomly generated subset (10%, n=2,566 after filtering for language) was analyzed qualitatively for pro- and anti-vaccination sentiment, and sub-coded for types of comments — announcements, unsubstantiated claims, claims with elaboration, and questions. Preliminary findings suggest that the majority of anti-vaccination Tweets were claims with elaboration, while a majority of pro-vaccination Tweets were unsubstantiated claims. Furthermore, an in-depth qualitative analysis of the anti-vaccination Tweets with elaboration suggested the presence of errors in scientific reasoning. Such errors include the use of anecdotal evidence for claims against established scientific findings, overgeneralization of conclusions drawn from research conclusions, flawed interpretations of statistics, and reasoning based on sociocultural biases. Findings from this study have implications for science communication, particularly in examining the persuasiveness of arguments for and against vaccination. Additionally, the findings have implications for improving science literacy by shedding light on the importance of appropriate scientific reasoning in evaluating scientific information critically for valid forms of evidence.

Characteristics of Authentic Scientific Discourse in Social Networks: The Case of Drinking Water Fluoridation
Doris Shaheen-Asakly, Daniela Orr & Ayelet Baram-Tsabari
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

This study explores authentic scientific discourse in the social media from a scientific literacy perspective using the socio-scientific issue of fluoridation of drinking water.

Little is known about the authentic expressions of adults’ scientific literacy in their everyday lives. A scientifically literate citizen can use scientific practices, nature of science aspects and argumentation in understanding socio-scientific issues. We examine these aspects of scientific literacy in an authentic online environment.

First, by quantitative content analyzed to aspects of scientific practices, nature of science, stance regarding water fluoridation and framing, in open Facebook group and page discussing the fluoridation of drinking water. The discussion was dominated by male commentators (70%), and by those opposing fluoridation (81%). Items opposing fluoridation tended to use a political framework, items supporting fluoridation tended to use an economic framework. The shared scientific literacy features expressed by the commentators were ‘obtaining, evaluation and communication of information’ (36%) and ‘analysis and interpretation of data’ (28%) both of which refer to scientific practices. Also ‘science as a way of knowing’ (12%), referring to nature of science. Supporters of fluoridation used more scientific literacy components in their items than opponents.

Next, we characterize argumentations following a news clip story about the fluoridation of drinking water. Analyzing 15 Facebook discussion threads, to identify emerging themes, argumentation structure (e.g. conclusion, qualifier), reasons (e.g. personal, authority), and positions regarding water fluoridation. Nine themes were identified, including politics, and media. The basic ‘skeletal’ structure was the common argumentation structure; authority and rule-based reasons were the most frequent argumentation reasons. proponents used more high-quality argumentation structure and reasons.

These findings can inform the fields of science education and science communication about public engagement with science among social media Facebook users, and scientific literacy usage in the real world.

Citizen Science for Promoting Public Engagement with Science
Yaela N. Golumbic, Ayelet Baram-Tsabari & Barak Fishbain
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

Many leading citizen science projects have invested greatly in creating a user-friendly experience and designing platforms for data submission, social interactions and learning materials. These platforms have often been shown to enhance motivation and enjoyment, serve as community building tools, enable participant to share their findings, collaborate, and engage in discussion. However, while many of the citizen science projects have publics’ needs in mind, their main goal remains advancing scientific research and hence project platforms do not necessarily comply with the desires of the public involved.

Here, we describe the development process of a data presentation platform used in the citizen science project “Sensing the Air”. This project had two goals: A. Design a user-friendly, practical platform for air quality data collection and presentation B. Enhance public’s ability to use scientific data for answering real scientific questions for improving their well being. To achieve these goals, we applied a user-centered design approach. The user-centered design is based on the active involvement of users, to improve the understanding of platform requirements, and conduct iteration of design and evaluation.

We conducted ten interviews, three focus groups and an online survey to determine the public needs and desires in such a platform. The platform gives participants open access to all data collected by the air quality monitoring units, analyze the data, discuss the results, make suggestions for further research and use their new scientific knowledge to further advance social involvement and activism. Applying the user-centered approach, contributed to a better design and development of these tools, and ultimately supports publics’ needs in a clear and practical fashion. This approach looks at citizen science as more than a tool for scientists for creating new scientific knowledge, transforming it into the relevant, practical science, citizens want it to be.

Footprints of Fascination: Digital Traces of Public Engagement with Particle Physics on CERN's Social Media Platforms
Kate Kahle1*, Aviv J. Sharon2* & Ayelet Baram-Tsabari2
1 CERN, Switzerland
2 Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
* Equal contribution

Although the scientific community increasingly recognizes that its communication with the public may shape civic engagement with science, few studies have characterized how this communication occurs online. Social media plays a growing role in this engagement, yet it is not known if or how different platforms support different types of engagement. This study explores how users engage with science communication items on different platforms of social media, and what are the characteristics of the items that tend to attract large numbers of user interactions. Here, user interactions with almost identical items on five of CERN’s social media platforms were quantitatively compared over an eight-week period, including likes, comments, shares, click-throughs, and time spent on CERN’s site. The most popular items were qualitatively analyzed for content features. Findings indicate that as audience size of a social media platform grows, the total rate of engagement with content tends to grow as well. However, per user, engagement tends to decline with audience size. Across all platforms, similar topics tend to consistently receive high engagement. In particular, awe-inspiring imagery tends to frequently attract high engagement across platforms, independent of newsworthiness. To our knowledge, this study provides the first cross-platform characterization of public engagement with science on social media. Findings, although focused on particle physics, have a multidisciplinary nature; they may serve to benchmark social media analytics for assessing science communication activities in various domains.

Is Science Inherently Boring? A Comparison of Science and General Items on Major Israeli News Sites
Yael Barel-Ben David1, Ayelet Baram-Tsabari1 & Erez Garty2
1 Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
2 Davidson Institute – The Educational Arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

The modern world requires non-scientists to make science related decisions concerning technologies effecting quality of life such as vaccinations, GMOs, Global warming etc.. In many countries the public’s main source of information and updates about science and technology is the mass media. Unfortunately, in recent years we witness the collapse of traditional journalism all over the world with science journalism being a major casualty. One potential solution is to encourage scientists to write about science to the public facilitating the public’s main source of information – the news media. The research question addressed here is if published on the same platform, is there a difference in the public’s engagement with science items written by scientists and general items written by the website’s organic reporters? By statistically comparing quantitative parameters (klicks, share, likes etc.) of 67 science items written by scientists and published on ‘Mako’ and ‘Ynet’ news websites with 67 corresponding items written by an organic ‘Mako’ and ‘Ynet’ reporters, published on the same channel and at the same time, we were able to say that there is no significant difference in the public’s engagement between the different items. Based on our data it seems that public’s interactions with science-related news are not significantly different from other news items, even when written by scientists.

Knowledge of and about Science Benefits People’s Shallow Evidence Evaluation
Friederike Hendriks, Dorothe Kienhues & Rainer Bromme
University of Münster, Germany

Scientific literacy should encompass students’ capabilities to deal with scientific information of everyday relevance (e.g. judging about science based health claims found in the Internet). We investigated plausibility judgments about scientific claims in an experimental study with n = 231 participants of all ages. In a repeated-measures design it was varied, whether claims were justified a) by strong or weak statistical evidence (high or low numerical probability) or b) by strong or weak expert testimony (highly pertinent or rarely pertinent expert) (e.g. Hornikx, 2008). Furthermore, we ask if two components of scientific literacy impact on these plausibility judgments. Therefore, a test measuring knowledge of science (KOS; knowledge of general science facts) and knowledge about science (KAS; e.g. what makes a good experiment, how to derive conclusions from evidence) (OECD, 2006) was administered. Results showed that in general, the plausibility of claims supported by expert testimony was rated higher than that of claims supported by statistical evidence. Strong evidence led to higher ratings of plausibility than weak evidence. An interaction indicated that participants differentiated strong and weak evidence more in their plausibility ratings regarding claims based on statistical evidence compared to their differentiation for strong and weak claims based on expert testimony. This differentiation between weak and strong evidence was furthermore supported by KAS. Higher KOS was related to more critical judgments of plausibility. In conclusion, our study shows that science literacy (both KOS and KAS) may benefit shallow evidence evaluation based on judgements about credibility cues. Implications for science education and the public’s understanding of science will be discussed.

Motivated Reasoning Could be Reasonable: Warranted Vigilance when Evaluating Dubious Scientific Claims
Lukas Gierth & Rainer Bromme
University of Münster, Germany

Amidst long standing scientific controversies such as vaccination and climate change, not only among scientists, but also between scientists and science skeptics, pseudo scientists and outright science deniers, lay people are required to make up their mind about scientific phenomena on a regular basis (Bromme & Goldman, 2014). However, most people lack the necessary expertise to evaluate scientific claims on face value and instead gravitate towards the supposed evidence more in line with their own preconceived notions about scientific topics (Sinatra, Kienhues, & Hofer, 2014). This form of motivated reasoning is closely associated with the confirmation bias and offers fertile ground to propaganda messages by science deniers. Fortunately, where most lay people lack scientific prowess, most are capable at judging trustworthiness and pertinence of experts, even if they do not always apply these abilities in evaluating socio-scientific controversies (Bromme & Thomm, 2016). However, by providing source information beforehand Van Der Linden et al. (2017) were able to lessen the effect of climate change skeptics’ propaganda messages. Vigilance in the face of information provided by groups deemed likely to deceive might have led to greater scrutiny the pseudo-scientific message. Additionally, motivated reasoning is not always a driver of cognitive bias. Instead, Mata, Sherman, Ferreira, & Mendonça (2015) found self-serving reasoning about health statistics by smokers to lead to better numeracy skills in dealing with ratios and likelihoods (and therefore less cognitive bias). In combining both approaches above, providing source information and reasonable self-serving reasoning, we hypothesize that vigilance and the fear of deception might lead to more scrutiny and less susceptibility to bias, which is uncharacteristic of other forms of motivated reasoning. To this end (and in line with Mata et al., 2015) we ask participants to make judgments based on data presented in a contingency table; depending on varying levels of source trustworthiness, we expect different levels of performance on the judgment task. Specifically, we expect low source trustworthiness (due to a perceived conflict of interest) to evoke vigilance, thereby leading to a more rigorous examination of the presented numerical data and more sophisticated reasoning.

Social Factors and Credibility Assessment of Scientific Content on Social Networking Sites
Arnon Hershkovitz1 & Tsahi (Zack) Hayat2
1 Tel Aviv University, Israel
2 IDC Herzliya, Israel

Credibility assessment of scientific information is key to people’s attitudes towards, and acceptance of science communication. Despite the central role social networking sites play in users’ content consumption—scientific content included—the credibility assessment mechanisms utilized within these platforms are still understudied. This poster will report on a series of experimental studies we have conducted in recent year, exploring the role of some important social factors—popularity, diversity, and tie strength—within the credibility assessment process of scientific content on social networking sites. The studies are drawn from theories of online information assessment, specifically the Prominence-Interpretation theory and the Elaboration Likelihood Model. Guided by these theories, we explored the social dimension of content credibility assessment. Research populations included grade-school pupils, as well as university-level students. Findings from these studies have important implications for both science communicators, consumers, and for broader understanding of credibility assessment within social networking sites.

Supporting Scientists in Engaging with the Public: The Development and Validation of an Automated Jargon Identification Program
Tzipora Rakedzon1,2, Elad Segev3, Noam Chapnik3, Roy Yosef3 & Ayelet Baram-Tsabari1
1 Faculty of Education in Science and Technology, Technion- Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
2 Department of Humanities and Arts, Technion- Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
3 Department of Applied Mathematics, Holon Institute of Technology, Holon, Israel

One basic recommendation when communicating science to the public is the use of nontechnical vocabulary and clearer language. However, because scientists are trained to speak with highly specialized language, avoiding jargon is difficult, and there is no standard to guide scientists in adjusting their messages. In this research project, we present the development and validation of an up-to-date, scientist-friendly program for identifying jargon in popular written texts, based on a corpus of over 90 million words published in the BBC site during the years 2012-2015. Validation of the jargon identifier, the De-jargonizer, involved three mini studies: (1) comparison and correlation with existing frequency word lists in the literature; (2) comparison with previous research on spoken language jargon use in TED transcripts of non-science lectures, TED transcripts of science lectures and transcripts of academic science lectures; and (3) a test of 5,000 pairs of published research abstracts and lay reader summaries describing the same article from the journals PLOS Computational Biology and PLOS Genetics. Following validation, we used the De-jargonizer to assess science and engineering graduate students’ use of jargon in academic and popular science writing before and after a popular science intervention given as part of an academic writing course. We ask whether students use more jargon in their academic texts as opposed to their popular science texts, and whether they use an appropriate amount of jargon when writing a popular science texts for non-experts following a popular science intervention. Students’ work from three semesters were collected and analyzed, resulting in 888 writing samples from 222 students. Findings indicate that students use more jargon in their academic texts than their popular science texts, but they also show that the percentage of jargon in popular science texts to be beyond the recommended level for non-experts.

The Science Communication of Whale Watching: A People-Focused Approach
Wiebke Finkler
University of Otago, New Zealand

The context of this project is the explosive growth of global whale watching, a multibillion dollar industry around the world, attracting at least 13 million people every year. Positioned in the realm of wicked problems, whale watching possesses high levels of complexity and social conflict, characterised by a high degree of uncertainty and a profound lack of agreement on values. The failure of sustainability is, in part, due to ineffective public communication and poor uptake of science related to impact assessments of whale watching.

The application of marketing communication has the potential to contribute to more effective science communication. The research 1. develops a conceptual science communication marketing SciCommercial Model, 2. outlines a brand for creative visual science communication video production, termed SciCommercial video, and 3. applies both SciCommercial model and the creative SciCommercial video to an empirical study on Good Whale Watching through the production and testing of a Good Whale Watching SciCommerical video, focusing on proximity to whales and best-practice boating behaviour.

Key elements proposed as part of the SciCommercial Model are the market-concept (and inherent people orientation), audience segmentation, framing, the importance of politics and media, as well as underlying social behavioural psychology relating to consumer behaviour. The results highlight the potential of SciCommercial videos in influencing people. These findings have significant implications for the potential of whale watching SciCommercial videos as an educational management and marketing tool, to influence people towards more sustainable whale watching consumer choices.