Jo Røislien is a professor of medical statistics at the University of Stavanger, and has been involved in numerous research projects in medicine and health. As a medical statistician, he has worked to improve quantitative research methodologies in a number of fields from cancer research, clinical trials, nursing research, radiology, rehabilitation, obesity, drug research, addiction, public health and prehospital critical care.
Episode Description
Communicating facts about science well, is an art. Especially if you are trying to reach an audience outside your area of expertise. A statistician in Norway however, is convinced that how you say something is just as important as what you say when it comes to science communication. That topic is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Jo Røislien.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
Communicating facts about science well is an art, especially if you're trying to reach an audience outside your area of expertise. A statistician in Norway is convinced that how you say something is just as important as what you say when it comes to science communication. And that's a focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Joe Roislien. He's a professor of medical statistics at The University of Stavanger, and has been involved in numerous research projects in medicine and health. As a medical statistician, he's worked to improve quantitative research methodologies in a number of fields. In 2011, he also helped create and hosted a TV series about mathematics, stats and numbers for a general audience in Norway, or Iceland, and has since written and hosted multiple science TV series and short films for national and international audiences, including being the first ever Norwegian host on Discovery Channel. Joe, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jo Røislien
Thanks for having me.
John Bailer
Joe, I'm mad at you. You have so many cool things that you're doing. I hardly knew where to start. I guess I thought the way that I get us to begin our conversation is to let you talk a little bit about some of the organizing principles. And you have this, this organizing principle I will tank, TEK. And I was wondering if perhaps maybe we could start with just telling us a little bit about what that means, in terms of science communication to you?
Jo Røislien
I've been doing science communication for several years, and I'm a statistician, so I'm concerned with both things. So I was sitting there in spring 2020, when a pandemic hit. I was watching TV; everyone was watching TV. And they were talking about pandemics and viruses and everything that public health agencies were talking and talking about, and I was like, is this really good science communication? Do people get what they're saying? So we apply for funding for a huge research project on how to communicate science effectively, when there's risk or something at stake. And one of the things that we did was that we went through everything that has been published scientifically about effective science communication. And when we pulled all of that together, there were four things that stood out. For every type of communication that actually succeeded in reaching an audience, the first one of them was T for trust. I mean, if you don't have trust, well, people won't listen to you. So that's a given. That's fair enough. And then we are humans, and humans have emotions. And if you don't appeal to human emotion, while people won't listen to you, they also won't bother. And they won't even remember because emotions are running through your body all the time. And when you have a strong emotion, that is basically your body and your brain telling you, this is important. Remember this, it's like putting a postage sticker inside your brain. So the E for emotion is important. And then for narratives, people are suckers for stories, though, because what it turns out when people do a lot of experiments that we've done ourselves, lots of experiments, when we've had people in laboratories, we do experiments, and people say they're like facts, and they learn a lot from facts. And they get motivated for facts that trust facts, blah, blah, blah, facts, facts, facts, and then they stand up, and they get out of the studio. And then they don't choose facts; they choose stories. So the end for narratives is incredibly important. And then the K for creativity. The brain has a built-in mechanism that if you expose it to something that it has heard before, seen it before, it's not important. I mean, it's like the fan in your office, right? You hear it when you enter the room, but eventually, you can’t hear it, you can’t eat it, you can't have sex with it, nothing's gonna happen. So you forget about it. That means you have to be creative, the TEK. And the thing is that in Norwegian, TEK spells the word, so for Norwegian scientists that end up with that acronym, it's, like, more beautiful.
Rosemary Pennington
I have a question about the T in that trust, because in the United States, there has been this real pushback against trusting scientific fact. We saw it during COVID. And then during COVID, it just seemed like it just really exploded. And I wonder what suggestions you have for statisticians or scientists or other researchers who are trying to figure out how to communicate the work they're doing? How might they build trust with an audience? How do they go about doing that in an environment where it might be a little hostile?
Jo Røislien
The thing is that for many, many years, we, the scientists, know everything. We will have the knowledge, we have trust in us. So we haven't really been talking about, are we trustworthy? So we always say, oh, no, people don't trust scientists. And then we say that it's their fault. It's the people's fault. But we never look ourselves in the mirror and think, hmm, is there anything I could be doing differently? When I look at myself, do I see someone who's trustworthy? But we think that because our first names are doctors and professors and blah, blah, blah, we can just go on and on. We have to think carefully. Are we trustworthy? Why should people trust us? And a lot of research has gone into this. And what builds trust? Well, if you're open, if you invite people in, if you discuss with them, if you show them that you care, I mean, all these human things that we're doing when we talk to one another, like right now, we're talking to one another, I'm happy having a cup of coffee, maybe you're having to drink a glass of water or something. And we're chatting, now we're building trust with one another? Do we do that with our audience as scientists? I don't think so. We just keep talking because we are the scientists. And we know, it does not build trust.
John Bailer
So I'm curious, as part of this communication, of some of these concepts. Do you test the effectiveness of this? How do you do some of the study of this, I noticed with AI, in particular with your effort on the effort really was fascinating to me. And I thought it's, you know, really incredibly important. I mean, the idea of establishing a key scientific concept, looking at the artistic choices you'd make, and then conducting the experiments. And that's it. So maybe I'm starting backwards in terms of this process. But the idea that somehow you evaluate how well your communication works, could you maybe take us through that process with an illustration?
Jo Røislien
You know, one of the things that we did in the project, what we wanted to try to figure out is, is there an evidence base for science communication? I mean, experience can bring you far. But still, medical research is packed with experience not matching the evidence. So we're like, it's just like this for communicating sciences. Well, and it's funny, I've been doing this for more than a decade on TV, and with all of that, we had a lot of success. But we're like, why are we successful? Why is this really working? You know, I'm a mathematician at heart. I'm really curious about taking something big and complex, and turning it into something small and easy, understandable. So when I ventured into researching science communication, it turns out, of course, I was not the first in the world. Somebody had done it before, models that do this. And there's something called the mental model for science communication, which basically says, one: figure out what it is that you want to say? And when I talk to scientists, very often, they don't know what they want to say. They want to talk about what they know. But when you talk to people who work in advertising, communication agencies, they're incredibly concerned with, what is the exact thing that you want to say? Because you cannot say it well, unless you know what it is. So trying to figure out exactly what it is, is really, really important. Now, the second thing is, so I want to say this thing, that's number one, number two, what I don't want to say. If I'm talking to other academics, well, I can use advanced words and blah, blah, blah, all the scientists stuff. If I'm talking to my kids, they're 9 and 11 years old, I have to use completely different words, to try to explain what Daddy does for work, right? And then you have all the people in between. Are they grown ups or are they teenagers? Do they love science? Do they hate science? Do they love statistics? Did they pass or fail statistics class? Are they nurses or engineers working in a store or the hairdresser's? All that comes into play. And we try to figure out exactly who it is. How can you find great metaphors, if you don't know who they are? So that's number two. And then number three, you have to create the communication. And we the scientists pretend to like okay, so then I just write something about the stuff that I know and then you read it out loud, right? That's not creating communication. When you talk to ad agencies, they’re like, so is it a podcast? Is that a video? Is it social media? Or maybe you should give a public lecture? Is it a poster of the subway? Going through all of that. I mean, I've done a lot of TV series on national TV, but national TV, I mean, that's for grownups, right? The kids are on social media. So if I'm trying to reach out to kids, and I'm on TV, it doesn't matter if there's 500,000 people watching, it is the wrong 500,000 people. And then eventually did it work? And very often, as scientists, we're like, oh, so I was on the radio, and I talked about my science, checking all the boxes reporting to the head of the department. But the people got it, it didn't listen, to change anything. Very rarely we check that. So in our project, that was kind of one of the things that we wanted to see. Does it matter if you choose to create a video about the pandemic, where you just have an expert standing there, you know, in a white lab coat, just saying something for 60 seconds. Or maybe you could create a weird stunt where you’re peeing in a bathtub, or something like that. You want to say we won't be able to say as much, but maybe we'll stick better. Or you could really do some cool, you know, classic TV, Nat Geo Discovery Channel explanation, where you have balloons and stuff like that. Or you can make something really, really artistic that the teens would love. So we created four different videos. And then we show them to 1000s and 1000s of people and see what motivated them. What did they learn the most from a MOBA, we found weird stuff like questionnaires about intention to forward right, would you forward this to your friends? Or would you not, and the results were crystal clear, though, that something works better than other things. And on a mass scale, which I'm interested in, if there's something that works better for a large group than something else, then we should do the thing that actually works. And that testing takes forever, right?
John Bailer
So now, can you step through that with an example. Now, I love the framing here. So all of a sudden, I found myself thinking about, well, like exponential growth, you know, why? Or why are some of these efforts that people are talking about doubling times or with you know, how fast this pandemic is increasing? Why are some of these interventions going to work? We've talked to previous guests about some of the things that they did with simulations to try to illustrate the movement of this. Harry Stevens did a really lovely piece that was in the Washington Post. So could you talk through the four parts of what you wanted to say, you know, who you were targeting, and then what communication seemed to nail it?
Jo Røislien
What things were really hard for people to get through the pandemic was how does the virus transmit? I mean, is it droplets or is it by touching something? Or is it just floating around in the air? And then we were like, okay, so if this is the thing that's difficult to communicate, let's figure out how we should do it. So then we hired a science communication video production company, I mean, professional science communicators. And we were sitting there in the room while they were bouncing ideas, and they were like, oh, yeah, maybe we could shoot something. It's always cool to shoot something because that would be like spinning so we could shoot something. Oh, maybe we could have a train crash. That's bigger. That's cooler. Or maybe if we have Miley Cyrus on the train, singing that song, that will be cool. Oh, no, maybe that's too big. What do we do that’s smaller? What if we use pee? I mean, if you pee in a pool, I mean, it will spread out, right? So maybe peeing would be cool liquid filament from above, right? So they were bouncing off all of these ideas. And then we were like, I want the one video that's a traditional one that tries to explain the best it can. One that has the potential to go viral. And one that's everything can be done. And then they sat down and then we wrote a script, a 60 second script, where you have the traditional expert, just reading up something with a lab coat, explaining how transmission works. And then we had a second video where we did all the fun things that we've been doing on TV, where we had balloons that would kind of mimic the virus spreading and you will see different graphical representations of how it was spread, large particles, small particles, and then we had a third video where we actually did that…we took a bathtub, and we had some pee in that, and we asked people, would you step into that bathtub? And they were like, no way. And then we show them an elevator. I said, What do you do when you step into the elevator? Of course, everyone was up into the elevator. And then we told them Yeah, but there was someone with COVID was actually just in here, but you can't see it. So huh. And then the final one, we created a rather artistic version, where we had a, you know, classic, soft voice over cool music, with people walking around and touching things and sharing coke. And we will talk about how viruses spread. So we created four different videos. And then we tested these on 1000s of people. We know their background, I mean, how old they are, their gender, or things like that. And screen them. So how did the various movies work? What films did they learn the most from? Which one would they forward, blah, blah, blah. And when the results came in, and we started doing the statistical analysis, it turned out that the more artistic things didn't work as well as we had planned. No, no. And on the other hand, the scientist just standing there, lecturing, didn't work at all. Still, the far end didn't work. But the middle part where you try to explain, but using graphical visual tools, with a voiceover is more emotional, something in that area tends to work better. For our next project, we will try to figure out if we changed the tone of voice, if we tried different presenters, I mean, in Norway, we use female presenters. I mean, in Scandinavia, of course. Maybe that wouldn't fly as well in the US or Germany, I don't know. And for large scale communication, we need to figure out those things as well. It also turns out if people are too young, size doesn't work, either. Because scientists are older and wiser, right? So there's all of these factors that come into play. And I was like, I mean, can we even express moments like this in communication? Does it even make sense? I come from the natural sciences. And in natural sciences, you can pull everything apart, you can optimize for this and optimize for that in the glue together. And it works. That's why they're landing on Mars on the first try. But you can't optimize for the best script, the best host, the best background, the best photographer, individual engines glued together, and then it will be great. No, there's an interaction here. And how does that come into play? I'm really curious about trying to sort of dive further into that.
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories, and today we're talking with the University of Stavanger’s Joe Roislien about science communication. You talked about how you have done TV, and I am a broadcast journalist by training, and I didn't want to do TV. I did radio and stuff. And so I'm curious how you transition, like why you made that move, why you decided that doing science communication, and this big, very visible public way, was something you wanted to pursue. And maybe if you could talk a little bit about what you learned, working on these TV projects, as you sort of think about how to improve science communication?
Jo Røislien
You know, the funny thing is, I didn't choose it, it chose me. What happened was I did my PhD in geostatistics and Petroleum Engineering. I'm from Norway, right? That turns out the rocks such as lying there, nothing happened to change jobs. And my first job was as a statistician at a research hospital, and I was like, oh, man, I'm going to solve everything. You just take my math and stats and figure everything out. And then it turned out that it was kind of complicated, turns out, the human body is complicated. And also the people that I was working with…medical doctors, nurses, they weren't really interested in statistics at all. So I was like, huh, how can I get them to understand statistics? I mean, these are quantitative research projects. They don't want to listen, they don't get it. If I talk about equations and numbers, you see there is just glass out, they won't listen. So I started talking about statistics in new and creative ways, and everyone I met, I was like, blah blah, statistics, creative new ways. How can you do this? So it was at this after party on a Saturday night, and I was sitting there talking to a guy, you know, you can hear me, I'm talking all the time. I'm always like this. And it was just going on, and we were emptying a bottle of whiskey and then another and then it turned out that he was working in a television production company. So they called me up the day after and said, “We want to create a TV series about math and stats, and we want it to be hugely successful. How do we do that?” I didn't have a TV at the time. I didn't own a television show. And then I was like, this is a perfect job for me. I took some time off from research and started working with television. And since I didn't know anything about it, I was listening. I was watching, I was paying attention. What are they doing, you know, the scientists just venturing into a new field, then you realize that these people, they're doing a lot of the same things, right? They have some tricks, something up their sleeve. And what happened was, it wasn't even created. This first TV series called cifre digits was hugely successful. It was seen by 40% of all TV viewers watching. So I mean, as a statistician, not having a TV and all of a sudden you walk down the streets, and people will have autographs, you have to sign people's chests at the bar at 10pm. Because everyone will talk to you. I've been to all the cool TV shows. And you realize the power of moving images, it is incredibly powerful. So that's sort of why I was pulled into it. And I never left because it's hard. I mean, if you fail, you fail spectacularly. It's pretty good. One will write about it in the papers, and will talk about it on the radio that you failed. But if you succeed, there are few things that can be living images.
John Bailer
You know, as I'm thinking about you doing this show, I was wondering, what was the hardest concept you had to try to communicate on your TV series?
Jo Røislien
Great question. No, you know what, I wanted to be a pop star when I was younger, clearly didn't happen. This year, I'm on a podcast.
John Bailer
40% of the viewing market, I think you may have achieved your pop star status.
Jo Røislien
No, that's working with a director, he had created a lot of music videos for international pop stars. He was good at making things come alive. And we went to New York to shoot something one day. And we had this huge fight. Because he said, Well, these are moving images. This is television, we have to have cool stuff that's moving across the screen. If not, we should do a podcast, right? If it's just audio, it's a podcast, we have to see something. And I was going, you know, but mathematics is very abstract, and it's in your head and intellectual and blah, blah, blah. And he was like, Well, if you can't get it out of your head and onto the screen, why are we here? And he was right. Sounds like I took all the creativity I had in my youth trying to be a pop star in figuring out how we can do this. And one of the things that I'm really concerned with is it's randomness. I mean, I'm a statistician. Randomness and chance events rule our lives to a much greater extent than we'd like to think. And eventually having been working with, you know, nurses and medical doctors at university and trying to teach them statistics, I ended up using rice. So I’d have a handful of rice, and I’d throw it onto the floor. Everyone now knows that the rice grains will be spread randomly on the floor. I mean, you saw me throw the rice. But then again, if you look closely, there will be patterns. That will be rice grains lumped together. There will be rice grains in a straight line, there will be rice grains making out the first letter of your first name. But it's still just chance events. So we were making the TV series. I said we have to talk about randomness. I mean, it's an incredibly important concept in probability theory, mathematics is everywhere. And I told the story about the rice, they were like, Ah, well, we get it in a way. And it's explanatory. And then the director came in and he was like, There's no way I'm filming a floor. Like, now I kind of get it. It's not very cool. But really, you still get the general idea. So we're like, can we make it bigger? Like everything's cooler when it's bigger? So we looked across the room and in one corner, we had some plastic boxes with 1000 yellow rubber ducks that we bought online. I mean, you never know when you might need 1000 yellow rubber ducks. They're kind of cool, aren't they? So the director filled his trunk with yellow rubber ducks, picked up a friend of his, and she's a cinematographer. And they drove around downtown Oslo, the capital of Norway, anywhere from where we could dump rubber ducks to simulate rice grains and we ended up in an outdoor pool. It was January and freezing cold, and the cameras were set up. And then I basically just threw 1000 yellow rubber ducks into the pool in slow motion. And now 10 years later, people still come up to me on the street and like Ha, I remember those yellow rubber ducks man, clearly explaining randomness.
Rosemary Pennington
Yeah, I feel like I'm gonna have to, when we're done talking, go and try to find this video because it makes me think of that very famous ad campaign where people dumped bouncing balls down one of the hills in San Francisco. And that was kind of like the visual, I was getting so naive to see how these ducks compare.
Jo Røislien
Yeah, the fun thing is that several of the things that we did on that TV show in Norway eventually spread and we see a lot of people internationally have copyrighted various versions that we did. And it's kind of cool when you have this, this little idea. And you're sitting there and on IKEA sofas and trying to figure out what to do with it as it grows and grows. And if you find a good explanation of something, it has its own life, you know, it starts living, and then you can spread it way beyond your own voice. So that's kind of what I'm looking for, ideas that explain something complicated and have their own life.
John Bailer
You know, we've had guests before that have talked about the statistics or simply, plot elements. Let's talk about that. And that that framing has kind of changed my orientation in many ways. I was looking at the various groups that have been involved in the work that you do. There's public health, where you're thinking about learning and behavior change as being an outcome. There's risk communication, where you talk about trust and credibility as being critical aspects of that. There's media components, which is catchiness, and attention and reach there. So you have all of these, the desperate, not desperate, but potentially very different backgrounds of people that are involved in this. Can you talk a little bit about the team that you work with? And then sort of complementing that? How would someone prepare to be on such a team? You know, what are you going to tell the journalist who wants to communicate quantitative stories better, or the statisticians who want to prepare to develop their presentations in more impactful ways? What are some of the words of wisdom you might give us?
Jo Røislien
You know, actually, one of the research projects that we did was we talked to a lot of people involved with communicating during the pandemic, everything from public health scientists to professional communicators. They were like, so what are your strategies? What do you focus on all of that? And it was really fun to see that the results sort of divided the group into two different portions. One part was people who came from science, and they were incredibly concerned with the truth. The facts had to be right. So to them, communication was about getting the facts, right, then you tell the facts. That’s a very short and very linear process. Then you talk to the professional communicators, they're also concerned with facts, but they're like facts: that's step one. That's the baseline. Now the communication work starts, right? The creativity, finding ways to, you know, get people interested, grabbing on to something that stands out a PLC or emotions, how do we do all of that. And then we actually went through some creative communication sessions, to see how it all panned out, and started to compare them through observation. And when you say, how do you put teams of those different types of people together? Turns out that that's actually one of the hardest things in making effective communication. Because you have one group that views communication as a linear process, you do this, that thing happened, and these things happen, and then we're done. And then you have one group, where you bounce up every single idea, and you can twist and turn up to the very end. But chaos seems to be what's going on. We even call it that creative chaos. But these are the people who create Hollywood movies, right? They do pop music, they do commercial ads, so they create final products that are immensely popular. So it's not chaotic, but we started plotting it graphically, it was kind of like viewing a linear regression. But with the same slope with very different variation parameters. For some of them, it is just A, B, C, D, E. For the others ,it may have to end up in the same place. So I actually have been giving a lot of talks to scientists and public health communicators about this struggle. How do we get these two different groups to actually communicate? And the thing is once to offset it, there are two different groups, one linear and one creative chaos, then like, oh, and is it like that? Well, then I can just change the way I work. If I know that they are chaotic, well then I know that I won't be freaking out as much. So, I'd say my background from doing advertising and stuff like that, the thing that we called leading creative people, is very different. And if I didn't have that, I don't think I could work in those projects at all.
Rosemary Pennington Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.