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When I was in graduate school from 1998-2004, my professors and mentors talked about one strategy for getting science to the public—publishing journal articles. As problematic as the peer review process is, producing science still remains the best source of knowledge on the path to enlightenment. For instance, across 30 years, Gallup found that Americans consistently believe violence and crime keeps getting worse than the year before despite sociological data showing a steady, systematic decline in the United States (with a few exceptions such as Chicago). With the continual influx of new information, and refinements about previous knowledge, the importance of scientific communication becomes increasingly important.
Publishing scientific articles in peer-reviewed journal articles is just the beginning of educating the public about science. Consider this—a scientific article that is cited 100 times is considered "a classic" (actual term used by a distinguished professor evaluating a faculty member for tenure). Should we rejoice because 100 people mentioned an article? Take a moment to ponder this metric of impact. Most readers probably don't get beyond the abstract in reading an article and merely hunt on Google Scholar to find something, anything, to support a claim they wanted to make. And they chose your article because it showed up in the first 10 Google results and a PDF was available with one click. I don't want to bust your bubble of self-importance. I want you to consider other ways to get your work to a larger audience. An audience who would be interested to uncover recent discoveries about human behavior - especially if you can provide a compelling rationale for why they should care and how the results are important to them. As of today, there are approximately 325,700,000 living in the United States and 7,632,819,325 in the world. It is time to reconsider the value of working for 2-3 years to conduct research and 1 additional year to publish this work in a scientific journal, only to be read by .0000013% of the world. Here are some suggestions for how to get the science to a greater proportion of society [NOTE: I am going to use myself as an example to offer concrete ideas and potential costs and benefits for the simple reason I know myself better than the scientists I follow such as Drs. Maya Tamir, Dacher Keltner, and Mark Leary].
Before you read anything else, know your niche and be able to articulate it to your neighbor, the tax attorney. Best-selling author Gretchen Rubin likes to say "ubiquity is the new exclusivity." In other words, in a world where you can find the answer to everything online, being visible wherever your topic appears increases the frequency your work will enter into the conversation. Plug in the term "curiosity" into Google, and on the first page you will find an article that I wrote on the science of curiosity for a magazine in 2010. Plug in the term "psychological flexibility" into Google, and you will find references to research that I co-authored with Dr. Jonathan Rottenberg and others. These are a few of the topics that I research, write on, and speak about. Know your niche and say yes to opportunities to speak and write about your topic. Once you get this piece down, we can hone in on the mechanics of educating the public about science.
1. Create home pages where people can find your work. Create a personal website where you can host information about who you are, what you care about, and what they can expect to learn from you. My original website was created by one of my graduate students for a few hundred dollars and only recently did I upgrade it with an amazing professional programmer recommended to me by a colleague. My website is designed with the audience in mind. While scientists love to keep a chronological order of their publications, the audience doesn't care. They are interested in topics to quickly find content that intrigues them. For this reason, I organized access to my publications by category. I stole this idea after scrolling through the work of one of my colleagues, Dr. Eli Finkel. I am not suggesting you use our approach. I am suggesting that you design websites and any other medium for expressing your work from the perspective of your audience.
2. Make it easy for people to find your program of research. It will take minutes for you to create a Google Scholar profile if you follow the outlined steps: here. Also consider other website portals that are popular for finding science such as: Researchgate. The benefit of website portals is that they also provide information on who reads your work and who downloads the PDFs. I have formed collaborations with several people who I contacted after this sequence of events—I learned they downloaded my articles, I went on their Researchgate page to read their articles, and then contacted them about data that might be compatible with what my Well-Being Lab is working on. Writing and conducting science can be a lonely endeavor with hours sitting alone at a keyboard, think of these social media outlets as an opportunity to increase connections that will bleed over into the real world.
3. Expose the world to your work when it is finished, not when published. What is a preprint? A completed manuscript that is ready to be submitted for publication. If the work is complete, why should you wait an entire year (or two) to submit it to a journal, wait for reviews, respond to reviews, and delay the dissemination of the work? In a digital world, this passive approach is antiquated. You can get valuable feedback from colleagues and intelligent consumers. Your work can be cited more efficiently and effectively. And if you are paranoid about getting scooped, this is the quickest way to let the world know what you did. For some outlets to upload preprints read: this.
4. Do not wait for the world to find you, contact them. In a 24/7 media cycle, bloggers, journalists, podcasts, and influential people on social media, are searching for content to share. Be a compelling storyteller. Help them with the story. Explain why your work is interesting and to whom. My lab recently published research showing that sexual experiences in daily life, especially if they were extremely pleasurable, led to boosts in meaning in life the next day. It was not hard to get journalists interested in a study of sex, pleasure, and meaning in life. But we didn't assume they would find and read the article. What we did is share several interesting angles to view our results. For instance, surprisingly, we did not find any differences between men and women. The media loves stories on how men and women are different, but there is a less frequent discussion about the vast amount of similarities between men and women on psychological constructs. We also found a moderator effect such that people who endorsed a closer relationship with their sexual partner experienced a greater next day boost in meaning after intensely intimate sex. This result offers a story about the particular value of intimate sex with a close romantic partner that is rarely replicated with a fling. We offered journalists ideas multiple entry points to our data.
How do you find journalists? Keep tabs of the people who write articles you enjoy reading. I have a list of journalists who write for The Atlantic, Vox, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, Slate, and other outlets. When my lab produces new work, I contact them. Yes, some of these emails get ignored. When not ignored, I often get a grateful journalist or blogger who wants to talk on the phone for 15 minutes or ask questions by email. A symbiotic relationship exists between scientists and the media. They need stories, you have stories. Jump into the fray and interact with these people. And if you need an introduction, colleagues who had a story published in a popular magazine or were featured on a podcast can be extremely generous (you know who you are—thank you!). One caveat—don't be a taker, be a giver or at least a matcher. Who do you think they are going to help first? Their tribe of close friends and people they interact with regularly. Cold emails and tweets are low probability affairs. And don't take it personally if someone doesn't respond to you—everyone is as busy as you think you are. Which leads nicely to my next point...
5. Be a student while also educating the public. Consider creating a twitter account. You can see mine: here. Let me offer some caveats about twitter. First, know why you are doing this. If you do not find it rewarding to have conversations about science, don't create a social media account to talk about science. If you are only doing this to promote your work, social media will be unfulfilling. Social media is engaging and fun when you have back and forth exchanges. Second, be prepared to find a small breed of assholes and trolls (if you are a woman or a non-white woman, or a non-white, gay woman, or a non-white, gay, Muslim, woman anticipate a larger breeding ground, unfortunately). Some people love to argue for the sake of arguing. Some people love creating anonymous profiles to spew hate. Some people will not like you - because of your research, your sex, your race, your sexual orientation, your personality, or something else. I can promise you this, social media is a form of exposure therapy. I have become less reactive to criticism. It has become easier for me to let other people spit vitriol without responding. Remember, you can refuse to respond to anyone. They are coming to your door, you do not have to answer the knock. Third, be generous. Assume positive intent by people you know and do not know. If you're right, you will behave in a way that is more rewarding to you and them. If you're wrong, you can be satisfied of your higher moral standards of conduct and not feel compelled to engage in unprovoked conflict. Assholes and trolls are low probability events. The vast majority of people are a pleasure to interact with. Unfortunately, it is human nature to be more affected by annoying interactions and remember them longer. Be intentional in reversing this trend—highlight the rewarding interactions. Relish the wit and generosity on social media. You will find the good guys and gals far outweigh the rest.
6. Be a blogger, the benefits are huge. One of the best things I have done is become a blogger. I primarily do my writing on Psychology Today but also keep my own personal blog on Medium and write regularly for Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, CNN, and several other outlets. The personal blog is useful for me as I can write anything I want quickly. I often write a personal blog post in less than 20 minutes. Medium is a very simple platform where literally you just open up a new page, not unlike a Microsoft Word document, and type away and submit. Psychology Today is a bit more cumbersome as you have to create a title and subtitle in a particular format, write up a teaser or trailer to get people interested, pick categories that a particular blog post fits into, and upload pictures with details on who owns the copyright. All of these details add an extra 20-30 minutes to writing Psychology Today blog posts. What is the benefit of blogging for Psychology Today? The visibility. I am a scientist, a professor in a psychology department, and yet my blog posts at Psychology Today have been read by over 2,700,000 readers as of today! To me, this is insane in the membrane. I never imagined reaching such a large, wide audience. I regularly get media requests through my Psychology Today blog. I am regularly contacted by organizations as a result of readers of my Psychology Today blog. I am regularly contacted by readers who seek help or advice which by offering them resources, gives me an immediate sense of meaning.
But the biggest benefit of a blog is the possession of a vehicle to work on thinking and writing. Many of my research projects, grant proposals, journal articles, public speaking outlines, book ideas emanate from blog posts. I have become better at my craft because of my blog.
7. Be a curator, not a media promotion machine. One of my favorite things in writing blog posts and writing on Twitter is being able to share ideas with the public. On twitter, I have a regular feature where I present some information and a link to "the study of the day" or "data of the day." If I can find the authors online, I tag them so they can enjoy the thrill of knowing someone reads and appreciates their work. If you scroll through my twitter find, you will notice that the vast majority of science is from other research labs. Curating the best that psychology has to offer is fun. Getting into conversations about scientific ideas is stimulating. There are a large number of intelligent, wise, witty psychological scientists on twitter and it is a vibrant community. It is worth the price of sweat equity to join the fray. And if you want people to invest in your work, be vigilant about giving credit to the work that influences you, and definitely give credit to any ideas you find online (acknowledging other people's writings and discoveries).
For now, these seven suggestions should help you get started. My hope is that you begin to envision the world outside of your department as an ever growing classroom that craves new knowledge (think of Borges' Library of Babel). A hungry audience is waiting for you. Don't complain about the lack of scientific literacy in the world, do something about it. Don't complain about mental health epidemics, do something about it. Don't complain about the decline of civilized discourse, change it. The time for passivity is over. Use the available tools to educate the world and enjoy the process.
