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Global Crisis: Theory, Method and the Covid-19 Pandemic
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Names: O’Hair, Dan, editor. | O’Hair, Mary John, editor.
Title: Communicating science in times of crisis / edited by H. Dan O’Hair, Mary John O’Hair.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020058501 (print) | LCCN 2020058502 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119751779 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119751786 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119751793 (epub) | ISBN 9781119751809 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Communication in science. | Truthfulness and falsehood. | Denialism. Classification: LCC Q223 .C65439 2021 (print) | LCC Q223 (ebook) | DDC 501/.4--dc23
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3 How Existential Anxiety Shapes Communication in Coping with the Coronavirus Pandemic: A Terror Management Theory Perspective 54
Claude H. Miller and Haijing Ma
Part 2 Promoting Health and Well-being 81
4 Communication and COVID-19: Challenges in Evidence-based Healthcare Design 83
Kevin Real, Kirk Hamilton, Terri Zborowsky, and Debbie Gregory
5 Identity and Information Overload: Examining the Impact of Health Messaging in Times of Crisis 110
Jessica Wendorf Muhamad and Patrick Merle
6 Social Media, Risk Perceptions Related to COVID-19, and Health Outcomes 128
Kevin B. Wright
7 Overcoming Obstacles to Collective Action by Communicating Compassion in Science 150
Erin B. Hester, Bobi Ivanov, and Kimberly A. Parker
8 Communicating the Science of COVID-19 to Children: Meet the Helpers 172
Jennifer Cook, Timothy L. Sellnow, Deanna D. Sellnow, Adam J. Parrish, and Rodrigo Soares
Alyssa Clements-Hickman, Jade Hollan, Christine Drew, Vanessa Hinton, and Robert J. Reese
Zifei Fay Chen, Zongchao Cathy Li, Yi Grace Ji, Don W. Stacks, and Bora Yook
Helen Lillie, Manusheela Pokharel, Mark J. Bergstrom, and Jakob D. Jensen
Brian H. Spitzberg, Ming-Hsiang Tsou, and Mark Gawron
Bobi Ivanov and Kimberly A. Parker
Justin
List of Contributors
Justin M. Bathon
Department of Educational Leadership Studies, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Mark J. Bergstrom
Department of Communication University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
Zifei Fay Chen
Department of Communication Studies, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
Michael T. Childress
Center for Business and Economic Research, Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Michael W. Clark
Center for Business and Economic Research, Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Alyssa Clements-Hickman
Department of Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Jennifer Cook WUCF TV & FM, Orlando, FL
Christine Drew Department of Special Education, Rehabilitation, & Counseling, Auburn University, Auburn, AL
Mark Gawron
Department of Linguistics and Asian/ Middle Eastern Languages, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA
Debbie Gregory
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Kirk Hamilton
Department of Architecture, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX
Erin B. Hester
Department of Integrated Strategic Communication, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Vanessa Hinton Department of Special Education, Rehabilitation, & Counseling, Auburn University, Auburn, AL
Jade Hollan
Department of Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Bobi Ivanov
Department of Integrated Strategic Communication, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Jakob D. Jensen Department of Communication University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
Yi Grace Ji
Department of Mass Communication, Advertising, and Public Communication, Boston University, Boston, MA
Zongchao Cathy Li
School of Journalism and Mass Communications, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA
Helen Lillie
Department of Communication, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
Robert S. Littlefield
Nicholson School of Communication and Media, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL
Haijing Ma
Department of Communication, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
Patrick Merle
School of Communication, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
Claude H. Miller
Department of Communication, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK
Jessica Wendorf Muhamad School of Communication, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
William Nowling
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
H. Dan O’Hair
Department of Communication, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Mary John O’Hair
Department of Educational Leadership Studies, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Kimberly A. Parker
Department of Integrated Strategic Communication, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Adam J. Parrish
Nicholson School of Communication and Media, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL
Manusheela Pokharel
Department of Communication Studies, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
Kevin Real
Department of Communication, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Robert J. Reese
Department of, Special Education, Rehabilitation, & Counseling, Auburn University, Auburn, AL
Matthew W. Seeger
College of Fine, Performing, and Communication Arts, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Deanna D. Sellnow
Nicholson School of Communication and Media, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL
Timothy L. Sellnow
Nicholson School of Communication and Media, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL
Rodrigo Soares
Nicholson School of Communication and Media, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL
Brian H. Spitzberg School of Communication, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA
Don W. Stacks
School of Communication, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL
Ming-Hsiang Tsou Department of Geography, and the Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA
Kevin B. Wright Department of Communication, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Bora Yook Department of Public Relations, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT
Lu S. Young Department of Educational Leadership Studies, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Terri Zborowsky Smith Seckman Reid Engineering, Nashville, TN
Part 1
Conceptualizing Communication Science and COVID-19
1 Managing Science Communication in a Pandemic
H. Dan O’Hair and Mary John O’Hair
University of Kentucky
In December 2019, events began cascading in Asia that changed the lives of everyone on this planet. The transmission of a virus from a bat to humans (known as zoonotic) was little understood at the time, but after only a period of three months, the coronavirus that became known as COVID-19 became the conversation on the tips of tongues of all people. The pushing out of science by medical, technical, even political professionals developed into an onslaught of information that tested most individuals’ learning curves.
The study of science communication has taken some important turns in the last 20–30 years. The meteoric spread of infectious diseases; changing conditions in society, in the atmosphere, in our climate; technological advances; and changes in human relationships have offered rich contexts in which to apply communication theory.
… disease outbreaks, terrorist acts, and natural disasters are obvious examples of contexts in which risk and health communication play increasingly critical roles. Broadcasting media have found risk and health crisis events to be particularly seductive as stories that fascinate their audiences. Moreover, with digital media evolving at such a rapid rate, many members of the audience have taken on the role of newsmaker or reporter—we are not entirely certain to what effect. Digital media has proven to serve many useful functions such as operating as a conduit for warnings to the public and acting as a gauge for how messages are received and acted upon. On top of these dynamic conditions, many in the science, risk and health communication research communities find extreme events and hazardous contexts to be on the increase, and an evolving media landscape introduces both challenges and opportunities for using communication to manage these situations.
(O’Hair, 2018, p. 3)
In this vein, this book will address issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the research implications intrinsic in the process of communicating science in times of crisis.
Communicating Science in Times of Crisis: The COVID-19 Pandemic, First Edition.
This book features chapters that reflect state-of-the art discussion by contributors who propose cutting-edge analysis on the topic of science communication involving extreme events. Authors were commissioned to explore the most salient issues in science communication contexts. Each of the chapters focuses on events and processes facing long into the future. In meeting this challenge, these volumes will feature a line of analysis that connects communication science issues, public policy, education, and the pandemic into a coherent narrative.
The authors created unique perspectives from which to portray these contexts and their accompanying challenges. Each chapter signifies the most up-to-date research in these areas with insightful ideas of where future research and best practices should proceed in the future. Like other recent scholarly books we have published (O’Hair, 2018; O’Hair & O’Hair, 2020), original research findings are offered from ongoing research programs, and in other chapters, unique frameworks and models are presented that unpack constituent elements of complex processes, and “casting them into discernable designs worthy of consideration by researchers, practitioners, and policy makers” (O’Hair, 2018, p. 4). The importance of this work is its ability to bring together the best scholarship in science communication research.
Just as importantly, this book is envisioned to serve as ignition for future work in science communication and to serve as a text for an increasing number of college courses in science communication. It is hoped that this book will nurture additional interest in many types of communication studies and offer connections between communication research and others engaged in science and educational contexts.
Each chapter was commissioned and reviewed with the ensuing guidelines in mind:
● Significant issue/problem?
● Theoretical grounding?
● Recent exemplars included?
● Practical and impactful implications?
● Implications (going forward)?
● New directions offered?
● Unique contribution to science communication research?
Communicating Science in Times of Crisis: COVID-19 Pandemic is intended for multiple audiences, with the primary audiences being those quite familiar to scholarly publishers and academic researchers. The book should attract interest among communication scholars and researchers focusing on science communication. In addition, it is hoped that seminars in science communication, crisis management, policy management, leadership studies, and even medicine will find the book attractive as a primary or secondary text. A third audience is likely to be found in main campus libraries and public libraries as well as libraries situated at health sciences centers. This project follows in the footsteps of other scholarly books, which have become a vital part of the academic and professional contributions of the communication disciplines. The chapters contained herein offer the opportunity to integrate ideas that are on the vanguard of science communication. The chapters throughout the book are organized through four parts: (a) conceptualizing communication
science and COVID-19, (b) promoting health and well-being, (c) advancing models of information and media, (d) and examining policy and leadership. These chapters are employed as part of the overall strategy we lay out in offering an approach for using communication science more effectively during times of crisis, in particular the pandemic of COVID-19.
In the following sections of this chapter, we develop a sketch of three interlocking concepts that facilitate a path for managing the COVID-19 pandemic. We start with a discussion about the essential nature of science communication and the known and unknown complexities of moving science into the public realm where it can be leveraged. In a following section, we confront an inescapable truth of human society—pandemics. It is here that we peel back the veneer of dangerous illnesses that have always confronted our societies and those that in recent times have served as the harbinger of what we confront today and what will likely be in future generations. The section that follows is meant to highlight how communication science can serve as a strategy for mitigating the horrendous effects of COVID-19 and perhaps other viruses confronting us in the future.
The Essential Nature of Science Communication
Conceptualizations of processes termed science have been part of our vocabulary for hundreds of years. Science has had an intermittent relationship with the public— sometimes exalted (moon landings polio vaccine, etc.), sometimes suspicious or evil (wartime gases, oversized mistakes like Three Mile Island) and all too frequently those with mixed reviews (vaccines, weight control treatment, etc.). Another way of thinking about science is through considerations of analyses focusing on elements of the scientific process. One of the more abstract but elegant descriptions of science is “a way of knowing” (McComas & Nouri, 2016, p. 560). The processes for generating science are generally thought to include notions that science is not entirely objective, is socially embedded, is empirically based, and cannot answer all questions (Alshamrani, 2008). One generalization that could be made about science is that it has had a long history of advancing the efforts of humans, society, medicine, engineering, and technology. Most of these effects have been heralded by those who understand them and benefitted from them.
It might be useful to conclude this section with broader thoughts about the essential nature of science. Littlefield (this book) advances important arguments supporting the historically close relationship between science and public policy. Examples abound demonstrating how federal policymakers have partnered with scientific organization in order to protect citizens from harm and even develop ways to promote their well-being (Littlefield). The chapter from Childress and Clark (this book) are equally robust in their perspective that science and public policy should enjoy a productive future together. We feel comfortable in borrowing an exemplar quote from the chapter by Ivanov and Parker (this book). The quote comes from Dr. Steven Stack, commissioner of the Kentucky Department for Public Health. Dr. Stack, a scientist, at a public news conference is exhorting the need for science to guide us out of the COVID-19 pandemic:
One point I want to emphasize is that it’s not politics if you have President Trump [Republican] and Governor Beshear [Democrat] making the same recommendations. It’s not politics. This is science. If we work together through this, we can succeed.
(Kentucky.gov, 2020, para. 8, italics added for emphasis)
What Is Science Without Communication?
Science Is Not an Alternative Fact!
(Yard sign during Biden–Trump presidential campaign, 2020)
Generating good science is a worthy goal among people who want to develop new ideas and processes that are exciting and novel, but the real value lies in science being applied in circumstances or contexts that can elevate conditions and states in the status quo. Science has limited value if it is not used, if it is not communicated to others. Unfortunately, there are too many scientists who feel they are either unskillful at communicating their science to others or believe communicating scientific findings is someone else’s job. These are two very serious concerns with the former being a condition of fear of being misunderstood and the latter being a mindset of misplaced responsibility. Regardless of which motivation is at work, science is being marginalized when it is not communicated effectively. We are particularly drawn to a passage in the Hester, Ivanov, and Parker chapter in this book that states “we have a shared responsibility to proliferate, effectively communicate, and disseminate scientific information that reduces risks for the common good of individuals in our families, communities and across the world.” If not communicated, is it really science?
A separate issue is one that ascribes further responsibility to scientists in their role as communicators. Freedman and colleagues (2020) contended that scientists need to be mindful about recent interest in scientific work regarding the virus and “use this opportunity to improve scientific communication and transparency as a means to improving our society … there remains an unmistakable sense that society needs science” (p. 4). Through what communication channel such as television, print, or social media modalities and through which conceptual and political lens a person is focused on are highly influential in how science information is processed. The chapter by Muhamed and Merle (this book) makes clear that situation and contextual properties of scientific messages are influential in portraying scientific information as intended by scientists.
It does not escape us that science can find a way out of the laboratory or field without determined efforts at communication. It is clear, however, that communication done right can move scientific findings into the hospital, office, other labs, and homes at greater speed and with greater confidence and convenience. Quite simply, good science will find an audience, yet that audience will be disappointed, confused, and frustrated without strategic messages that champion, promote, and explain its practical usefulness to the audience. Furthermore, scientific communication is expected to carry essential elements that ensure credibility and durability for the topics it is covering. To wit, messages should contain with them elements necessary to instill the type
of credibility that builds confidence from which people will make appropriate decisions about their health and well-being.
One way of thinking about credibility is through consideration of proven and accepted criteria that build messages, and eventually theories, by which the public readily accepts the assumption being advocated. Chaffee and Berger (1987) offered seven attributers that build “good” communication theory. We think the same principles apply in judging good communication science. These characteristics include the following:
● Explanatory power: The extent to which the science under consideration explains its purpose and to what extent does the explanation extenuate?
● Predictive power: The ability to forecast events or conditions into the future.
● Parsimony: The simplicity of the science. Is it easily described and understood?
● Falsifiability: The ability to test the science.
● Internal consistency: Generally understood as validity. Is the science internally consistent?
● Heuristic provocativeness: Is the science interesting enough to spark new ideas and new testing?
● Organizing power: The ability of the science to make sense or reduce uncertainty for what is known now.
The application of these principles offers the opportunity to judge the ability of messages about science for their worthiness and value. It is because messages come in different forms and through different media that criteria like those above provide scaffolding for improving how science gets in the hands of those who can use it.
Challenges of Science Communication
Notwithstanding our strong stance on communicating science, we are mindful that this process is fraught with obstacles, derisions, diversions, and mistakes. We will explore some of the more obvious challenges of science communication in this section. Issues such as trust, conspiracy theories, misinformation, public confusion, message, and information integrity loom large as obstacles to scientific communication.
A fundamental understanding in the communication process is that some level of trust is shared among those sending and those receiving messages. Trust is sometimes characterized as competence or reducing uncertainty or increasing predictability that helps to establish the legitimacy of science. But what must be understood is that the legitimacy of science is how that relationship between science and the various stakeholders is managed. One way of looking at trust in science is by examining some arguments about public trust in science. Figure 1.1 provides a simplistic view of how science is viewed as a means of instilling trust in the public about science.
Mistrust in the message or the communicator raises serious questions about what to believe and what advice to follow. Mistrust can flow directly from campaigns promoting conspiracy theories that undermine legitimate information from the scientific community (Ivanov & Parker, in book). With increasing exposure to false news, publics are put at greater risk because they are confused or become outright converted to a fake news viewpoint.
Figure 1.1 Scientists and science.
Information environments and information ecosystems (Childress & Clark, this book) are terms that provide useful scaffolding for understanding the complexity and relationship among information, messages, and media. Information ecosystems become all the more complex through social media where media users have easy and instant access to serve as receivers of information but also producers, directors, critics, and disruptors of scientific messages. Regardless of motive, participants in the information ecosystem have created a turbulent media environment that is not easily navigated when information is so easily transmitted. As Wright (this book) correctly points out, social media acts as a two-headed coin in the COVID-19 pandemic. On one hand, valuable information is circulated from scientific authorities to help prevent infections, contain the spread of the virus, and track the effects of the disease. The other side of the coin is more problematic in the sense that social media can “contribute to the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19” (Wright).
Another author team from this book (Lillie, Pokharel, Bergstrom, & Jensen) continued the narrative by illuminated how such a “saturated and at times contradictory COVID19 media environment made communication of scientific and health information challenging” sometimes to a point where media users are susceptible to mental illness complications.
One of the goals of this book is to identify the challenges facing science communicators, but also identifying strategies in service of communication effectiveness. One of the ways of doing so is by bringing together a large and disparate body of knowledge and distilling ideas that can separate fact from fiction. Spitzberg (this book) steps up to the task with two chapters that address the serious need for understanding and addressing the misaligned media behaviors that veer from what is known as truth about COVID-19 science. In one chapter, Spitzberg “calls out” the forms of information distortion such as misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news and follows up by synthesizing extant literature in the area, and then developing a typology that facilitates better understanding of what he terms “dismisinformation.” In another chapter, Spitzberg, Tsou, and Gawron (this book) mined social media messages containing conspiracy-related theories and false information and subsequently conducted geospatial analysis resulting in “a dashboard for near real-time surveillance of social media content related to COVID-19.”
Hard data, the lifeblood of communication science, is indispensable to the monitoring and tracking of viruses like COVID-19, and eventually serves a support function in mitigation strategies (as discussed above). The function of data is a primary focus of a chapter by Nowling and Seeger (this book). According to their perspective,
Data create situational awareness, informs strategic decision, and facilitates public participation in community mitigation strategies. In a more general sense, data addresses one of the most fundamental conditions of the pandemic; high levels of uncertainty about the level of threat and effective responses. ScienceCommu nication
Unfortunately, their own experiences with the virus were troubled by a “lack of resilience and standardization.” Nowling and Seeger reported confusion of data collection owing to the sheer scope of the disease and the inconsistency in which public officials perceived the impact of the pandemic. As it turned out, “The lack of accurate data and interpretations informed by science and public health practice may lead to misunderstanding, a reduced ability to manage the event, failures to comply with recommendations and significantly enhanced harm” (Nowling & Seeger). When fundamental issues, albeit critical ones, are compromised such as data collection and monitoring, the entire system of mitigation has much less chance of success. The next section will continue the discussion of data, information, and surveillance from a slightly different focus.
Pandemics: An Inescapable Truth
Disease outbreaks come and go. Outbreaks of coronavirus alone have appeared three times in the last eighteen years. In 2002, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARSCoV) accounted for 744 deaths across 17 countries. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) was first reported in 2012 causing 860 deaths in 21 countries (McLeod, 2020). Of course, there was the Ebola virus with major illness implications appearing in the outbreak of 2014–2016, although it was first discovered in 1976. Numerous outbreaks of bird flu (H5N2) have occurred in several countries, most recently in 2020, and in 2019, swine flu (H1N1) was identified in several countries. At issue is the fact that disease outbreaks can vary a great deal in how they are transmitted and how humans perceive their risks and how they subsequently react to them. COVID-19 is not a disaster simply because it is a pandemic, its widespread destruction is also due to the world’s lack of preparation and ill-advised responses to it. Moreover, a keystone of a pandemic is that it is more than a “contagion that is determined by the virulence of organism” (Dasgupta & Crunkhorn, 2020, p. 1), it is spread at various rates depending on the social and behavioral tendencies of human hosts.
How predictable was the outbreak of COVID-19? A number of individuals have strongly suggested that the virus is a Black Swan event, an extremely unpredictable incident with catastrophic consequences. As facts have come to light, COVID-19 was anything but a Black Swan, with multiple advanced warnings and predictions offered for something like a virus pandemic of this magnitude. According to the New York Times, “Three times over the past four years the US government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action” (Sanger et al., 2020). In 2005, Laurie Garrett, a scientific reporter testifying before the US Congress warned that
“highly virulent, highly transmissible pandemic influenza that circulates the world repeatedly for more than a year” would end up killing more people than all the known weapons of mass destruction “save, perhaps, a thermonuclear exchange”; she observed that “scientists have long forecast the appearance of an influenza virus capable of infecting 40% of the world’s human population and killing unimaginable numbers.”
(Renda & Castro, 2020, p. 2)
More recently in 2020, the television news magazine, Sixty Minutes and the New York Times reported on a simulation exercise designed and executed by the Trump administration designated with the code name “Crimson Contagion.” The exercise was highly complex, involving multiple federal agencies and 12 states simulating the effects of a large pandemic and the United States’ capacity to respond to such an event. Results from the simulation were produced in a draft report in October 2019. Crimson Contagion was not released until much later, but many high-ranking officials now had fair warning that an extreme event like a coronavirus would create dire conditions. Effective surveillance that produces solid and actionable intelligence is key to addressing epidemics or pandemics. A tool that is referred to commonly is the Global Health Security (GHS) Index, which is intended to serve as a comprehensive assessment and benchmarking measure of health security and related capabilities across 195 countries. The GHS Index is a project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and was developed with The Economist Intelligence Unit (https://www.ghsindex.org/about). An advisory panel of 21 experts from 13 countries developed the framework that is organized across six categories presented in Table 1.1 below.
According to its sponsors, GHS Index is expected to serve as a crucial monitoring resource and risk assessment tool as extreme events (medical, meteorological/climatological, terroristic, and others) continue to impose their destructive forces on humanity. However, results from assessments around the world were not encouraging as regards pandemic readiness and preparation: “National health security is fundamentally weak around the world. No country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics, and every country has important gaps to address” (https://www.ghsindex.org/ report-model).
These disappointing trends are reflective of a position taken by one of the author teams in this book. Chen, Li, Ji, Stacks, and Yook argued that “that the pandemic crisis morphed from a ‘natural cause’ (i.e., an animal virus transferring to a human virus) … into socio-political, economic, and cultural crises.” Their position was that through mistakes and missed opportunities to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities, a medical crisis morphed into something unimaginably more complex. A somewhat similar viewpoint was taken by another chapter in this book where Real, Gregory, Hamilton, and Zborowsky (this book) contended that the US healthcare system, in particular, is ill-equipped to handle extreme events like pandemics based on their short-term view healthcare delivery. Healthcare systems operate from a just-in-time strategy that is
Table 1.1 GHS index.
Prevention: Prevention of the emergence or release of pathogens.
Detection and Reporting: Early detection and reporting for epidemics of potential international concern.
Rapid Response: Rapid response to and mitigation of the spread of an epidemic. Health System: Sufficient and robust health system to treat the sick and protect health workers.
Compliance with International Norms: Commitments to improving national capacity, financing plans to address gaps, and adhering to global norms.
Risk Environment: Overall risk environment and country vulnerability to biological threats.
more cost-efficient driven under normal operating conditions. When the system becomes stressed, as with epidemic and pandemics, it simply does not have the capacity to withstand the surge of patients.
Getting to the Other Side: Communicating Science to Mitigate COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic brought many devastating heartbreaks to people across the globe. Deaths, illness, isolation, loneliness, inconvenience, bankruptcies, unemployment, quashed dreams, and fear of the unknown are just some of the more obvious issues that wreaked havoc with what was supposed to be a year of renewal—2020. At the same time, some extraordinary efforts, events, and collaborations may never have occurred without the presence of the pandemic. This section will discuss some of these special events and other silver linings that are pertinent to science communication.
At the time of this writing (January 2021), COVID-19 remained an unrelenting plague on the world. Voices ringing “this will be over in the summer (2020)” and “this will be just like the normal flu season” were muted and replaced with questions such as “how much longer can this go?”, “when will the vaccines fully kick in?”, and “will life ever return to normal?” Getting to the other side of the pandemic took longer than most people imagined, even for experts with the most optimistic viewpoints. Digital information management (Renda & Castro, 2020), strategic messaging (Ivanov & Parker, this book), new approaches to audiences (Chen et al., this book) collective efficacy (Hester, Ivanov & Parker, this book), more nuance policymaking (Childress & Clark, this book), and confronting and managing emotions related to the virus (Miller & MA, this book) are some of the strategies that are proposed to improve the chances of shrinking the pandemic to management levels.
Information technology must be included in any strategic plan for mitigating and responding to extreme events such as pandemics. We have discussed previously the largess of social media as a communication phenomenon, and social media will continue to flip that two-sided coin in issues involving controversial issues. Information technology will play a role in communications teleconferencing (such as Zoom), in drone delivery of product and services, and assisting with the diagnosis of viruses (Renda & Castro, 2020). It will take special measures of scientific communication to make possible the diffusions of these technologies on a wider scale.
Ivanov and Parker (this book) identified inoculation messages as potentially powerful strategies for supporting virus mitigation efforts. Specifically, they argued that inoculation messages could serve as methods to counter false information, address and minimize conspiracy theories, and help to resist anti-vaccination viewpoints. The value of inoculation strategies lies in their “potential to effectively counter scientifically-refuted false information (Mayorga et al., 2020). Just as inoculation messages displayed efficacy in neutralizing climate change misinformation (Cook et al., 2017; Van der Linden et al., 2017), this message strategy may hold similar promise in challenging the spread of false coronavirus information” (Ivanov & Parker, this book).
Collective action is not new to the communication landscape, although its potential influence on extreme events such as a pandemic has been understated at times. Hester, Ivanov, and Parker (this book) highlighted collective action as means for sharing
responsibility for problems that are too large and complex for individuals or small groups to confront. In their words, “we have a shared responsibility to proliferate, effectively communicate, and disseminate scientific information that reduces risks for the common good of individuals in our families, communities and across the world.” One of the ways Hester et al. suggest for mobilizing collective action is through communicating compassion in science, a unique approach in science communication thinking.
Successful efforts for mitigating the effects of pandemics must take into consideration the policymaking aspect of science communication. In this book, Childress and Clark take on this responsibility and offer a number of insights for how communication, pandemics, and policy can come together to move action forward on mitigation efforts. Childress and Clark make clear that the road to be traveled will not always be smooth:
Scientific and policy experts face obstacles in getting citizens, leaders, and policymakers to receive and embrace messages about risks and how to respond to them. In our hyper-politicized climate, for example, where everything from donning a face mask to following social distancing guidelines is often viewed through a political lens …. Nonetheless, as public health experts and others endeavor to flatten, and eventually eradicate the coronavirus curve, the strength of analysis, cogency of message, and form of delivery will determine the success in informing, educating, and influencing policymakers and the public.
One of the more controversial issues during the COVID-19 pandemic was K-12 education. Both parents and students grew weary of distance learning, causing great inconvenience for working parents and creating angst for local economies who soon learned the economic impact of open and thriving schools in their communities. A chapter by Bathon and Young (this book) reported data on school officials who related accounts of confronting leadership behaviors in their schools in which they were woefully unprepared to conduct. School superintendents reported that they were out of their element and in effect were facing a “public health crisis, not an education one.” In many instances, school leaders were so frustrated with the unfamiliar context they found themselves in, they pled with government officials to just make the decision for them. According to Bathon and Young, “[w]hile school leaders are trained to be good communicators, they were poorly positioned to conduct their own local epidemiological analyses. Unfortunately, the scientific consensus was not arriving quickly enough and the public desire for answers on school reopening plans grew overwhelming, opening the door to political intrusion.” Schools did adjust and found some silver linings in the process (enhanced technology for student who had none before the pandemic, enhanced technological skill development among teachers and students, and demonstrable game plans for future “weather days”).
Children are not immune to the fallout of a pandemic; even if they are not infected with the virus, they notice events and issues around them. It is not an easy task to ask erstwhile but sometimes piercing questions about circumstances they do not understand. Cook, Sellnow, Sellnow, Parrish, and Soares (this book) reported on a platform they developed to help children understand elements of the pandemic, in particular, those whose role is to help. Meet the Helpers is a series of television programs that
teaches children about emergency preparedness and the people who are there to help. Specifically, “Meet the Helpers was created to give public television stations of all types—regardless of news reporting ability—the resources needed to respond in times of crisis and support our youngest viewers. The original project included videos for the following Helpers: Doctor, Meteorologist, Paramedic, 911 Operator, Firefighter, Teacher, and Police Officer.” The programming was influenced by the theoretical notion of collective efficacy which when enacted among adults and children alike can have positive effects on children’s anti-social behaviors.
Two chapters in the book focused on healthcare and the pandemic. One was authored by Clements-Hickman, Hollan, Drew, Hinton, and Reese and took up the issue of telehealth. With increasing instances of healthcare professionals becoming motivated to reduce their risk of infection, telehealth became a favored choice for delivering care. Most indications are positive for telehealth, and Clements-Hickman et al. feel confident that this form of healthcare delivery is here to stay following the pandemic. Principle among the advantages claimed are convenience, profitability for healthcare professions (fewer no-shows), and clinical benefits. Mental healthcare and educational programming were highlighted as services that are particularly suited for telehealth. The second chapter on health was authored by Real, Gregory, Hamilton, and Zborowsky and centered on the design of healthcare systems. Their chapter describes “how frameworks of hazard control and risk perception can address pandemic responses in the design of healthcare systems … and how the pandemic has affected typical hospital design, the use of communication technology in this new context, and how communication and evidence-based design (EBD) alter in times of crisis. … . Evidence-based design is crucial for mitigating infection transmission through purposeful design.”
Two other chapters in the book focused on emotions associated with the pandemic or strategies using emotions to lessen the effects of the pandemic. Miller and Ma explored how anxiety can be pronounced following “death thought awareness” brought on by news of the pandemic and how terror management theory can be purposed to manage these anxieties. According to the authors, this approach can be relevant to a number of contexts including interpersonal communication, health communication, and crisis management. The other chapter using emotions as a means for benefiting scientific communication related to the pandemic was authored by Lillie, Pokharel, Bergstrom, and Jensen. They develop a framework entitled, The Emotion and Critical Reflection Model, that was emotion-based such that messages can be developed that are emotion-inducing and novel and will trigger critical reflection in people receiving the messages. This critical reflection helps to create a state of contemplation whereby the receiver of the message is in a state of “attitude and behavior change in line with the message.”
A Cautionary Tale
We were talking at breakfast one morning in November 2020, and Mary John was ranting about the ridiculousness of the pandemic and it burgeoning so out of control that nothing else was part of our vernacular. We pondered how incredible this would have seemed to us just nine months earlier. We started wondering if even more outlandish
scenarios would have seen more or less plausible—sudden thermonuclear war and insidious interplanetary space invaders were our other two bizarre proposals. We were not entirely sure if the pandemic ranked as a clearer and more predictable calamity than the other two. Perhaps that is the tragedy and paradox of COVID-19—few of us saw it coming in its full fury and relentless persistence. We hope and expect that science communication will be a beacon of light to see us through this pandemic.
References
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Dasgupta, S., & Crunkhorn, R. (2020). A history of pandemics through the ages and the human cost. The Physician, 6(2). pre-print v1 ePub 29.05.2020. https://doi.org/ 10.38192/1.6.2.1
Freedman, T. S., Meadley, M. B., Erwas, N., Ruhland, M., Castellanos, C. A., Combes, A. J., & Krummel, M. F. (2020). Lesson of COVID-19: A roadmap for post-pandemic science. Journal of Experimental Medicine, 217(9), e20201276. https://doi.org/10.1084/ JEM.20201276.
Mayorga, M. W., Hester, E. B., Helsel, E., Ivanov, B., Sellnow, T. L., Slovic, P., Burns, W. J., & Frakes, D. (2020). Enhancing public resistance to deliberate fake news: A review of the problem and strategic solutions. In H. D. O’Hair, & M. J. O’Hair (Eds.), Handbook of applied communication research (pp. 197–212). Wiley-Blackwell.
McComas, W. F., & Nouri, N. (2016). The nature of science and the next generation science standards: Analysis and critique. Journal for Science Teacher Education, 27, 555–576. doi:10.1007/s10972-9474-3.
McLeod, V. (2020, March). COVID-19: A history of Coronavirus. Lab Manager. https:// www.labmanager.com/lab-health-and-safety/covid-19-a-history-of-coronavirus-22021
O’Hair, H. D. (Ed.). (2018). Risk and health communication in an evolving media environment. Routledge. (Translated into Chinese, 2019.)
O’Hair, H. D., & O’Hair, M. J. (Eds.). (2020). Handbook of applied communication research (Vol. 2). Wiley-Blackwell.
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Van der Linden, S., Leiserowitz, A., Rosenthal, S., & Maibach, E. (2017). Inoculating the public against misinformation about climate change. Global Challenges, 1(2), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1002/gch2.201600008
2
Comprehending Covidiocy Communication
Dismisinformation, Conspiracy Theory, and Fake News
Brian H. Spitzberg
San Diego State University
Fake news and conspiracy theories are not new (Baptista & Gradim, 2020; Hofstadter, 1964; McKenzie-McHarg, 2020; Van Heekeren, 2020). For example, the rumors affiliated with the Black Death plague in the mid-1300s falsely scapegoated Jews for poisoning town food, wells, and streams as a cause of the mysterious illness and death. Such rumors meshed well with preexisting prejudices and beliefs (Bangerter et al., 2020; Carmichael, 1998; Finley & Koyama, 2018) and became instrumental in persecution, massacres, and burning of Jews as a result (Cohn, 2007; Porter, 2014; Raspe, 2004). Such rumors originally circulated as collective memories and later became concretized in print media and town records, resulting in selective beliefs being contextually framed by the particular cultural time and place in which they were reconstituted (Carmichael, 1998). While disease outbreaks may serve to unify groups and communities, pandemics such as the Black Death clearly provided convenient and efficient rhetorical tools for the spread of false narratives justifying persecution of groups (Cohn, 2012). Jews, Muslims, China, and other individuals and groups continue to populate the conspiracy theories regarding the COVID-19 crisis (Freeman et al., 2020a; cf., McManus et al., 2020). Clearly, a better understanding of the nature of such forms of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation can serve to better protect society from such abuses. This chapter seeks to examine the conceptual categories of fake news and conspiracy theory as well as selective theoretical perspectives that elucidate the reasons for their efficacy.
While it seems likely that the mass fabrication of information has existed throughout human history, constrained by the media of the day, what is new to contemporary information diffusion is its ability to ignore the historical friction of distance, and thereby “spread globally at an extraordinary pace” (Alemanno, 2018, p. 1). Fake news and conspiracy theories are born and diffuse rapidly in times of heightened uncertainty, when high quality information is difficult to access, when trust in available sources of information is low (Shahsavari et al., 2020), and when uncertainty, anxiety, threat, or fear are high (Goreis & Voracek, 2019; Leone et al., 2020; Lobato et al., 2014; Madisson, 2014; Moulding et al., 2016; Rommer et al., 2020; Sheares et al., 2020; Swami et al., 2016). Even without the informational stress of fear and uncertainty, evidence generally shows that fake news diffuses faster and farther through social media than reliable forms of news (Sommariva et al., 2018; Vosoughi et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2020). Such
Communicating Science in Times of Crisis: The COVID-19 Pandemic, First Edition.
trends are reinforced by amplifying and accelerating entrepreneurial, institutional, and strategic agendas (Avramov et al., 2020; Caballero, 2020) in which “social networking sites foster the virtual marketplace of misinformation” (Savelli, 2016, p. 24) and “conspiracy brokers” activate the marketplace (Leal, 2020, p. 505) through the form and content of such messages (Baptista & Gradim, 2020; Geschke et al., 2019).
In order to ascertain the extent of the problems presented by fake news, conspiracy theories, and other forms of misinformation and disinformation, it is necessary to traverse a path through many trees in the hope of seeing a full forested landscape. Specifically, with the evolution of the new media landscape, the technologies of deception have evolved in ways that were difficult to achieve in prior eras. As such, some definitional explorations are necessary to specify the nature of such information disorders (UNESCO, 2018).
The Matrix of Dismisinformation
The ever-evolving masspersonal media landscape (O’Sullivan & Carr, 2018) is also still relatively fluid with regard to many of the key concepts and constructs of informational distortion in the digital realm. The term “fake news,” for example, is receiving more usage, even if its specific definition may seem elusive and increasingly malleable (Avramov et al., 2020; Leal, 2020). For example, as of this writing, between the years 2010 and 2020, the phrase “fake news” caught up with and rapidly surpassed “pseudoscience” and “conspiracy theory” in usage (Google nGram; see Figure 2.1). It is not clear from such trends what the interrelationship is between these terms, if any.
One of the central elements of most of the concepts discussed thus far is that information or communicated messages intentionally or unintentionally lead consumers of that information to form inaccurate beliefs or perceptions of the world as it actually is. As such, most of the concepts involve some degree of either communication error or deception. For example, Table 2.1 illustrates some concepts related to such communicative distortions. There seems to be more general commonality than differences. Most of the distinctions revolve crucially around the issue of intent or motive: Is the distortion of meaning manipulated for intentional misrepresentation, or is it more
Figure 2.1 Google nGram of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and fake news (September 2, 2020, case insensitive, smoothing, adapted).
Table 2.1 Illustrative conceptual definitions of key concepts.
Concept Illustrative Definitions
● “automated accounts that use artificial intelligence to steer discussions and promote specific ideas or products on social media such as Twitter and Facebook” (Allem & Ferrara, 2018, p. 1005).
● message streams or “accounts that may range from completely automated (i.e. traditional scripted bots) through to hybrid accounts that utilize varying degrees of automation and/or scheduling software, thus producing extremely rapid (1 second or less) coordinated retweet activity” (Graham et al., 2020, p. 17).
● “an unverified claim of conspiracy which is not the most plausible account of an event or situation, and with sensationalistic subject matter or implications. In addition, the claim will typically postulate unusually sinister and competent conspirators. Finally, the clai m is based on weak kinds of evidence, and is epistemically self-insulating against disconfirmation” (Brotherton, 2013, p. 9).
● “a conspiracy theory can generally be counted as such if it is an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who attempt to conceal their role (at least until their aims are accomplished )” (Sunstein & Vermeule, 2009, p. 205).
● “conspiracy theories are narratives about events or situations, that allege there are secret plans to carry out sinister deeds” (Andrade, 2020, p. 1) or “attempts to explain particular events or situations, as the result of the actions of a small, powerful group, with perverse intentions”(Andrade, 2020, p. 2).
● “causal explanations of events or circumstances that posit a powerful group acting in secret for their own benefit and against the common good… they represent one form of misinformation” (Connolly et al., 2019, p. 469).
● “attempts to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors” (Douglas et al., 2019, p. 4).
● “commonly defined as explanatory beliefs about a group of actors that collude in secret to reach malevolent goal” (van Prooijen & Douglas, 2018, p. 897).
● a belief system predicated on the integrated assumptions that (1) there is an emerging paradigm shift toward an awakened consci ousness in which (2) groups coordinating covert manipulation of social and political order will be revealed and reformed (Asprem & Dyrenda l, 2015; Ward & Voas, 2011).
● “the deliberate intention to mislead, without prior notification of the target of the lie” (Ekman & O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 674)
● “intentionally deceptive messages” (Lukito et al., 2020, p. 201); “types of information that one could encounter online that co uld possibly lead to misperceptions about the actual state of the world” (Tucker et al., 2018, p. 3).
“disinformation, which is deliberately propagated false information; misinformation, which is false information that may be unintentionally propagated ; or online propaganda, which is potentially factually correct information, but packaged in a way so as to disparage opposing viewpoints (i.e., the point is not so much to present information as it is to rally public support)” (Tucker et al., 2018, p. 3).
Bots
Conspiracy theories
Conspirituality
Deception
Disinformation
Table 2.1 (Continued)
Illustrative Definitions
● “used interchangeably with terms like misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, lies, deception, and ‘trolling’” (Raders torf & Camilleri, 2019, p. 5).
● “online publications of intentionally or knowingly false statements of facts that are produced to serve strategical purposes and are disseminated for social influence or profit” (Humprecht, 2019, p. 1975).
● “fabricated information that mimics the output of the news media in form but not in organizational process or intent” (de Regt et al., 2020, p. 169).
Fake news
● “entirely fabricated stories, most often designed to attract copious views and perhaps to also affect public opinion” (Carlson, 2020, p. 378).
● “news emanating from websites that falsely claim to be news organizations while ‘publishing’ deliberately false stories for th e purpose of garnering advertising revenue” (Tucker et al., 2018, p. 3).
● “information including ‘phony news stories maliciously spread by outlets that mimic legitimate news sources’” (Torres et al., 2018, p. 3977); it is information (transmitting untrue propositions, not considering the cognitive state of the sender) and disinformation (again, tr ansmitting untrue propositions, but now consciously by the sender) (Shin et al., 2018).
● “the phenomenon of information exchange between an actor and acted upon that primarily attempts to invalidate generally-accept ed conceptions of truth for the purpose of altering established power structures” (Weiss et al., 2020, p. 7).
● “a news article or message published and propagated through media, carrying false information regardless of the means and motives behind it” (Sharma et al., 2019, p. 4).
● “fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent…. Fake news overlaps with other information disorders, such as misinformation (false or misleading information) and disinformation (false information that is purposely spread to deceive people)” (Lazer et al., 2018, p. 1094).
● “the empirically observed problem of the mass distribution of deceptive content across mostly digital media” (Kopp et al., 2018, p. 10).
● “information that is inconsistent with factual reality” (Brody & Meier, 2018, p. 2).
● “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers” (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017, p. 213; see a lso: Bondielli & Marcelloni, 2019; Kim & Dennis, 2019, p. 1026).
● “an amalgam of long-standing approaches and strategies taken to delegitimize information itself” (p. 3): It has been examined from various perspectives, including: (1) “Fake news as a result of information overload and ‘the principle of least effort;’” (p. 3); (2) “Fake news as a result of poisoned public discourse, logical fallacies and overconfidence” (p. 3); (3) “Fake news as context-independent in a ‘post-truth’ society” (p. 4); (4) “Fake news as propaganda/disinformation” (p. 5); (5) “Fake news as rumor, misinformation, and conspiracy theory” (p. 5); and (6) “Fake news as parody, satire, and political kayfabe” (p. 6).
● “a type of online disinformation, with totally or partially false content, created intentionally to deceive and/or manipulate a specific audience, through a format that imitates a news or report (acquiring credibility), through false information that may or may not be assoc iated with real events, with an opportunistic structure (title, image, content) to attract the readers’ attention and to persuade them to believe in fa lsehood, in order to obtain more clicks and shares, therefore, higher advertising revenue and/or ideological gain” (Baptista & Gradim, 2020, p. 5).
● “false or inaccurate information regardless of intentional authorship” (Southwell et al., 2019, p. 282).
Misinformation
● “health-related claim of fact that is currently false due to a lack of scientific evidence” (Chou et al., 2018, p. 2417).
● “a reason to regard a theory as pseudoscientific is that it purports to be scientific but has been refused admission to, or excluded from, a research tradition of this kind” (Dawes, 2018, p. 290).
Pseudoscience
accidental, innocently or sincerely believed by the source of the messages sent (Ekman & O’Sullivan, 2006)? For the sake of simplicity, and with some tongue-in-cheek, the two ends of this intentionality spectrum will be collapsed under an umbrella term of “dismisinformation.” The wink-and-a-nod is that such information should be “dismiss-ed” and thus the noun becomes a perlocutionary speech act of sorts. This term has the advantage of being both a simple declarative as well as perlocution—it attempts to describe and persuade at the same time—recognize and then dismiss both disinformation and misinformation.
A formal definition of dismisinformation is any message or set of messages that represent a meaning complex discrepant from or incompatible with a sender’s intent and/or a relatively informed or expert consensual evidentiary state. A meaning complex here represents any individual or normative collective state of belief, value, or attitude and their interrelationships represented as a coherent articulable position, stance, attribution, explanation, or narrative. The phrase of “a sender’s intent and/or a relatively informed or expert consensual evidentiary state” refers to at least three potential tests of informational malformation: (1) deception, in the discrepancy between sender’s understanding of reality vis-à-vis the signification of the message sent; (2) the discrepancy between the message and majority expert consensus; and (3) the discrepancy between the message and majority expert consensus regarding the state of best evidence. Obviously, any of these may be empirically challenging to establish, and each is potentially fallible. However, given the impossibility of proving the affirmative (i.e., inductive verification), and the possibility of disproving the affirmative (i.e., deductive falsification) (Popper, 1980), each of these tests is at least feasible (Dawes, 2018; cf., Huneman & Vorms, 2018). The function of the term is to pejoratively encompass and advise against the entire spectrum of potentially strategic rhetorical strategies and tactics available for leading information consumers astray from potentially falsifiable evidentiary bases for belief and action, both individually and as a collective polity. Where formal conceptual definitions find themselves often formulated with the hope that their relevance will be sustained through various technological innovations and evolutionary developments, for the sake of systematic empirical investigations of dismisinformation, a more taxonomic approach may be necessary. There are several taxonomies and typologies relevant to the spectrum of dismisinformation, some of which are reviewed next.
Typologies of Dismisinformation
There have been many expeditions into the task of typologizing forms of both truth (Zimmer et al., 2019) and deception (e.g., Clementson, 2017; de Regt et al., 2020; Garrett et al., 2019; Pawlick et al., 2019), and theorizing their enactments, detection and management (e.g., Buller & Burgoon, 1996; Levine et al., 2016; Walczyk et al., 2014). Hopper and Bell (1984) conceptualized six types of interactional deception: fictions (e.g., make-believe, exaggeration, irony, white lies, etc.), playings (e.g., jokes, teases, kidding, trick, hoax, etc.), lies (e.g., dishonesty, fib, lie, etc.), crimes (e.g., conspiracy, entrapment, counterfeit, forgery, fraud, etc.), masks (inveigling, hypocrisy, back-stabbing, concealment, evasion, etc.), and unlies (e.g., distortions, false implications, misrepresentations). O’Hair and Cody (1994) distinguished five types of deception (i.e., lies, evasions, collusions, concealments, and overstatements), differentiated
