Dr. Emily Oster on science communication: Make your audience feel smart
CHIBE and the Behavior Change for Good Initiative recently co-hosted a keynote conversation with Emily Oster, PhD, Professor of Economics at Brown University, best-selling author, and founder of ParentData.
Dr. Oster spoke with Drs. Alison Buttenheim and Katy Milkman about how to communicate scientific evidence clearly, responsibly, and effectively.
If you missed the talk, find the YouTube recording here.
Read on for an edited and condensed version of some of the questions they discussed.
What communication skills would you recommend for trainees?
I want people to understand how to write without jargon.
I think there is a fundamental mistake that is often made in public communication, which is that people think that using jargon makes them look smart. They think: “Okay, I’m going to use these words, and that’s how I’m going to communicate to the listener that I’m smart, because I can use all these words.”
Effective communication requires that the person you’re communicating to leaves not thinking that you’re smart; you want them to leave thinking that they are smart and that you are trustworthy.
And to make them think they are smart, you need them to understand. If you are saying a lot of [words full of jargon] they’re not going to understand, and they’re going to get mad or confused. So that’s the lesson I would like people to take away is that it’s your job to make other people feel smart.
What’s on your tip sheet for being a good science communicator?
[Besides] not using jargon, I like a visual, and I think relating to something in people’s lives that they can connect to [is good] too. Even though we all love data, we know an anecdote is very compelling.
Last year I read a very long book about how to live a long time. And there’s a lot of stuff in the book, but there is one very easy take away: if you want to be strong enough to lift your luggage into the overhead bin when you’re 80, you need to be lifting heavier weights when you’re 40 because muscle mass declines overtime. The book is many, many pages long, but that’s a very crisp takeaway.
Think about your communication as like: “What is the one thing I want people to take away?” People cannot take away nuance from your writing. They can take away, like, one sentence.
That’s actually very hard because as academics, we’re constantly thinking about nuance. We’re constantly thinking about footnotes and limitations. In our academic writing, it’s really all about trying to hit all the angles and explain all the details.
In popular writing we’re much closer to: what’s the one thing I want these people to take away?
Do you have hypotheses about why your books have been so successful?
Who knows? Not really, but I would say, I think with “Expecting Better,” the feeling that I had like – “I would like to be talked to like an adult, and I want to understand what I’m being told, and I want to be able to make decisions based on understanding and evidence” – I think that resonated more than I had expected with the audience.
That’s still the thing that I hear from people: They say, “I really felt like I didn’t have control, and you helped me take control and feel confident in my decisions.” I think the most successful stuff that I do is when I’m able to leave people feeling like: “I understand what works for me, and I understand why I’m going to make this decision and not that decision.” I think that that’s something people really want.
What advice do you have around communicating to journalists so that they don’t misreport headlines? How do you help them print stories with the subtlety that you care to see communicated?
If I want to communicate with subtlety, I just write it myself.
I think the unfortunate answer to this is there is almost no way to avoid people [journalists] trying to oversimplify stuff because their incentive is to have a headline that people click on.
People really want these direct answers, and that’s what’s rewarded and that’s where the incentives are because that’s what people click on. They’re going to look for the quick-hit angle. It’s very hard to get them to not be click-baity because that’s their job.
How do you communicate about topics that have become politicized or controversial? What is your advice on how to do that well?
If you want to be talking about topics like this, you need to be ready to ignore the comments.
Also, something that I heard many years ago was from Glennon Doyle, and she says that outside your proverbial house of being a person, there’s a mailbox where people can put stuff, and you can’t control what people put in the mailbox, but you can decide what you take into your house.
I think about that all the time because a huge share of the time when I write stuff, particularly stuff about vaccines or dietary guidelines, somebody doesn’t like it.
[And I need to think about whether I’m] hearing feedback from people I respect and where I might want to modify or say something different, or is there something to learn from this? Or is it just a lot of criticism in my mailbox that needs to stay outside?
And in order to do that kind of communication, you really need to have or have learned the skill of not feeling bad about that kind of stuff. It’s something I work on a lot and have gotten much better at overtime. And so it means when I go to communicate about these things, I don’t need to think of that. I just assume, like, I’m going to say the thing that I think is right and that I think would be helpful for the people who are listening, and some people will be mad about that, and that’s fine.
Could you talk about communicating about health problems where we don’t have a clear right answer?
There’s 2 pieces. One is thinking about the goal not as giving advice or telling people what to do, but as trying to facilitate their decision making.
I want people to know how to ask a question. I want them to be able to engage with the data. And then I want them at the end to feel confident in the choice that they made.
There are many cases in which I do think there is a “right” choice. I do think people should vaccinate their kids. But I also think the goal in communication is to help people understand why that might work for them, which really means thinking about the decision making, not about the outcome.
That is especially important when there are things where it’s actually not clear that there’s a right choice. Somebody asked me: Should I circumcise my kid? I don’t know. It’s not my business. But what I think I can help them with is how do I get to a decision that I feel sort of ex ante comfortable with.
How do I help them get to a decision where they feel comfortable in the way that they made the decision?
And the other thing I think is really important for people to understand is that you can never be sure if it was the right decision. There’s a kind of uncertainty that can really paralyze your decision making if you are waiting to learn the right answer because sometimes you won’t, and you just have to accept that you’re going to make the best decision with the information you have.
I want to end with a lightning round for Emily of “underrated/overrated.” I’m going to give you a couple of things, and you can tell me if you think they’re overrated or underrated. First one: The Pitt.
Underrated. I love The Pitt.
X, formerly known as Twitter.
Overrated.
Hormone replacement therapy.
Underrated.
M.M.LaFleur, the dress company.
I love M.M.LaFleur, so I’m gonna go with underrated because it’s my very favorite.
The last one is that advice to get morning sunshine at a low angle in your face.
Oh my goodness, no. This is an example of something that drives me crazy. People are busy, okay? We have jobs, children, things to do. It’s too much. It doesn’t matter. Don’t do that. You don’t need a vibration plate either, by the way.