Psychological Insights for Science Communication

This course integrates lessons learned from psychology, behavioral economics, marketing, and sociology to the practice of science communication, with practical experience working to create and test new messaging for partner environmental organizations. Students learn about innate biases and heuristics that influence the communication of scientific ideas and data and the public¿s receptiveness to environmental messaging. Topics covered include information framing, attention and salience, public science literacy and numeracy, simplifying complexity and dealing with uncertainty, cultural and political contexts and social norms, and methods to motivate science engagement, evidence-based decision-making, and behavior change. Students will learn how to design new messaging strategies based on social science research and how to analyze their efficacy using basic statistical analyses in R (no prior programming knowledge is required). The course culminates in a project developing and testing new messaging strategies for real-world environmental organizations.