Ionica Smeets is, chair of the science communication and society research group at Leiden University. She’s also chair of the board of The National Centre of Expertise on Science and Society of The Netherlands. Her research lies in the gap between experts and the public when it comes to science communication, with special interest in the problems that occur when those groups communicate and what scientists can do about those problems. Smeets is the author of a number of journal articles on this topic and engaged in science communication for the public when she worked on a Dutch TV show about math. She’s also the co-creator of a children’s book called Maths and Life.
Episode Description
In a commencement speech in 2016, Atul Gawande told the crowd that science is a, "commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation." In the last ten years that understanding of science has become muddied for the public. Social media has helped fuel the rise of conspiracy theories built upon so-called alternative facts as people claiming to be experts spout anti-science ideas. Communicating scientific ideas was already difficult, but it’s become even more difficult in this environment. Science communication is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, with guest Ionica Smeets.
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
In a commencement speech in 2016 Atoll, Gawande told the crowd that science is a quote, commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. End quote. In the last 10 years, that understanding of science has become muddied for the public social media has helped fuel the rise of conspiracy theories built upon so called alternative facts, as people claiming to be experts spout anti science ideas. Communicating scientific ideas was already difficult, Carl Sagan notwithstanding, but it's become even more difficult in this environment, science communication is the 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 the American Statistical Association in partnership with Miami University departments of statistics and media, journalism and film. Joining me, as always, is our regular panelist. John Baylor, emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Ionica Smeets, Chair of the science communication and Society Research Group at Leiden University. She's also chair of the board of the National Center of expertise on science and society of the Netherlands. Her research lies in the gap between experts and the public when it comes to science communication, with special interest in the problems that occur when those groups communicate, and what scientists can do about those problems. Smeets is the author of a number of journal articles on this topic, and engaged in science communication for the public when she worked for on a Dutch TV show about math. She's also the CO creator of a children's book called maths and life. Yonica. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Ionica Smeets
Thank you so much for having me.
Rosemary Pennington
How did science communication become sort of your your lane.
Ionica Smeets
It's actually more or less by excellence. I was in high school. I was really doubting about what to study. I was thinking maybe journalism or theater, but I was also really good in mathematics. And then I figured, like, maybe I should study mathematics and do the other things as side jobs. Then somehow, after this study, I decided to do a PhD in mathematics. And I remember when I had a job interview, they asked me, like, what do you want to be after your PhD, a mathematician or journalist? And then I said, journalists, and they still hired me. Yeah, I really felt I'd ruin it, but in the end I said, like, wow, it's interesting. Like, it will be nice to have a journalist in this country who has been trained well in mathematics. So I did my PhD in number theory. Then I worked for a few years as an independent journalist, and then I got so annoyed about what was going wrong in science communication, and I felt a major part to fix were not on the journalist side, but on the academic side. So then I well, I started thinking about going back, and 10 years ago, I came back as a professor at Leiden to do this.
Rosemary Pennington
So I'm just curious, what kinds of things were you seeing as a journalist that made you say, No, I must go and become an academic and try to fix things.
Ionica Smeets
Well, one of the things that was very determining was a study done in the UK about how media exaggerate results from health news. And I think you probably know these kind of studies, but what the study found was that the major exaggerations were done by the press releases from the institutes and not by the journalists. So I thought that was interesting. I also see that, and I'm not sure if this is the same in the US, but in Europe, we usually have to spend a percentage of each research proposal on connecting to society. And then you see people who are really good at research in astronomy or some other field, but then they need to spend 10% of their huge budgets on science communication, and they have no idea. And then they make a terrible website or an app that costs, like so much money, and this terrible, and I thought, we we need to change something.
John Bailer
What a great backstory to how you got to what you're doing. This is, this is really, really neat, you know, and looking at your your your material, that some of the research that you've done, I thought it was really fascinating to see ideas from randomized clinical trials coming about, and some of the work that you are doing at that that all of a sudden, you wanted to evaluate these factors in a systematic and and, you know, kind of very careful way. What are can you? Can you talk through one of your your favorite examples of of where you've used ideas from. Clinical trial design to evaluate, evaluate effective science communication.
Ionica Smeets
Yeah. So first of all, when Rosemary read the introduction, I thought it was very funny that we have all these ideals for how science should be, based on evidence and facts. But then when we do science communication, it's quite often based on intuition, even for a very good scientist, or I really think we should have more evidence based science communication, and one way to do it is setting up randomized control trials. And I think one of my favorite examples is one thing we haven't published yet. We're still writing it up. It was part of a really big Norwegian project about communication during COVID. And I know you also had Joe rochelin on, who talked about it a few episodes back. Do you know the episode number by heart?
John Bailer
It's some number less than 355 that's, I think it's bigger than 300 too, but that's about as good as I can get
Ionica Smeets
here. So we did a really big project where we did a lot of different trials, where we tried making different videos about the pandemic and then measured how they work. So one thing that's important, like, when does science communication work and depends on your goals. So sometimes you want to inform people, sometimes you want to give trust, sometimes you want to spring them into action. So we had different videos and then measured what they did. But my favorite part was another part of this study. Before we were going to send out over 100,000 emails to participants, like, Would you like to participate in our study and fill out the survey, the person organizing it asked, yo, the Norwegian guy who's very famous in Norway, like, could you make a nice video to go with this invitation, and then people can see you the researcher, and then they will be more excited to participate in your study. And then we were discussing this, and I said, does it? And then Joe said, Yeah, I don't know. It sounds plasma attack. This is something you're asked to do quite a lot as a researcher, right? Like make a video. It's a lot of work if you want to make a good one. So we set up a small randomized control trial. Well, small in the sense that it was a very small project, but then it was big because we had 100,000 participants. Oh my gosh, you Yeah, it was very cool. And Joe actually made two videos, so one as a typical scientist, so just sitting in front of his webcam, crappy sound, just telling about how important the research was. And then one where he is, because he's also a TV host, I think one of the favorite variables in this project was also hair spray. So then he used hair spray, good lighting, good mic, and also, like, a very motivational speech, very passionate, like, very narrative. And then there was a third version where people just didn't get a video at all. And guess what? Not getting a video was the most effective group in getting people to fill out the
Rosemary Pennington
survey. Oh, that's really interesting. That
John Bailer
is so cool. I love when your intuition fails, when you kind of think that maybe it'll go one way, and you're completely surprised by the result. Oh, that's awesome. So that's you're writing that up now. It's going to be throwing that into the literature soon.
Ionica Smeets
Yeah, I hope it will be. Yeah, it always takes a while, as you know, but I thought it's also nice to share something on the podcast that isn't in the literature yet.
John Bailer
So so you've one of the studies that that we took a look at, and it's something, it's kind of near and dear to my heart as someone who is who taught build a data visualization class, taught that spent a lot of time talking about kind of good practice in that in that space, and effective communication. And you did. You were involved in collaborating on a project where you were debunking misleading bar graphs. So you know, why did you start there? What was it about bar graphs that kind of piqued your interest? And then how did you go about investigating that?
Ionica Smeets
Yeah, so this is one of my favorite projects of the past few years. So one thing is, I had been giving a lot of public talks when I was freelance journalist, I think next to TV and writing. One thing I did most was giving talks. And then one thing I really like to talk about was Misleading Graphs. And I have a collection of dozens of Misleading Graphs. And wherever you go, you know, people bring you new examples. So this has always been my hobby, and then I'd also been working with a journalist who does a lot on fact checking. And for fact checking, there are all these. It's rather obvious, but when fact checks start quite often, the headline would be the misleading fact, and then the claim would be in the text. They know by testing this, but also you could have thought of it by thinking, but maybe your intuition was wrong. But here, of course, you put the corrected claim in the headline, then you explain who said something that was misleading, and then you explain why it's misleading, and you end with the truth again. Now we're wondering about graphs, like, how does it work? There? When you see Misleading Graphs, should you put just a correction? Should you still show the original? What would be good ways to correct it? So we did a project which was really nice, with the fact checker from journalism studies, and then with someone with a background in rhetorics and a colleague who's at psychology at the statistics department there, and we took bar graph, basically because, well, it's the most used graph, and also the one where there's consensus that used to start at zero with your Y axis. And so what we did, we took different graphs with real data from the World Health Organization, and then we made misleading versions and nonsense. And then I was wondering COVID, you know, like, what do you measure then? Like, when is a graph misleading? This is a very tough thing.
You're pointed like, you Oh,
John Bailer
no, I think you're right. I mean, in some sense it's well, you know, you think back on some of the stuff that you might read from Tufte, like, lie factors. So people that might be looking at absolute differences, but instead are really looking at kind of multiples. They might think about kind of some ratio comparison of something that exaggerates a difference. So I think it's the misleading part for me. Gosh, I didn't realize I was gonna be tested today. Yeah, but you're absolutely right. I mean, that's so I think about relative differences and how it might convey an information that is an exaggeration of an effect that isn't present.
Ionica Smeets
Yeah, that's right, so maybe, yeah, it's good to say an example, one of the classic graphs you see popping up every time is body length of people. So there's this patient organization, and then you see the Dutch which are the tallest in the graph. So we always like this example from Indonesia, and they don't even come to our hips because they haven't started at zero. They have started somewhere halfway. So you see these exaggerations between lengths being blown up. And so most people in the field agree that you shouldn't do this. But then the question is, are you going to ask if people remember the values correctly, because we know that if you have seen a graph that is misleading in this way, even if you remember the value correctly, because usually the numbers are still readable, people still make different decisions if they have seen a misleading graph compared to a fair graph. So we ask people like, how how bad do you think this is pretty much that's what we asked. And then we shown them either Misleading Graphs or a correction. And then after that, we showed them also other Misleading Graphs to see if they learned something from having seen a correction. And then we did the same thing a bit later. So you would love to do this months later, but when you set up an experiment, one week later is already nice. What we saw that what was most effective was showing the misleading graph with a corrected version next to it, and that also helped people to be less mid lat in the future. But you do see that the effect is much smaller after a week. And one thing that I really like is that we also put it into practice. So we have, we are started the graph police.
John Bailer
Is that a web Do you have a website for the graph police? Or how does it?
Ionica Smeets
Yeah, but it's in Dutch. It's always like, like, science communication is so cultural and so national. So we do it in Dutch, with examples from Dutch media and politicians, because we also want to get feedback from the so we always call the ones who made it. And it's very interesting, like how people think about so what we found so far is that more research institutes who do something like that. They are always very interested in correcting it as soon as possible. So we had our National Bureau of Statistics who had a misleading graph, and they were like, Oh, we're really struggling, because we're trying to make our graphs more attractive, but we also still want to be correct. So that was really nice. But we also had, ah, we had an international one from Reuters, the press company, and they, they told us, yeah, that you have too much time.
Rosemary Pennington
Oh, you're listening to stats and stories, and we're talking about science communication with lighting universities, Ionica Smeets
John Bailer
yeah, maybe we should start the the graph police in English over here, and then you can, can lead the stats and stories Dutch that, you know, you get. That would be the next sort of, sort of an international trade agreement in this, I was wondering if we could change gears a little bit. I, you know, I've, this is all pretty serious stuff. I want to get, I want to look at the comics with you. I mean, I mean, we really, I mean, both rosemary and I just just really were tickled by this, yes, this
Rosemary Pennington
comic. Yeah. So I am curious, how did maths and life come about?
Ionica Smeets
Yeah. So it's a children's book for kids who are about 10 in primary school. And it started because there's a children's book otter, Edward van de Vendel. Yeah, and he's a very prolific author, so he has written over 100 books. He's very good at collaborating, and we became friends. Somehow. I always dreamed when I was a kid that I would be a children's book otter, so I tried to hang out in their surroundings. And this was by that at the time I when I was still a journalist, and I'd given a talk for kids who are around 1112 and answered their maths questions. And it was very close to Edwards home, and we had lunch afterwards, and I told him about my talk, and he said, I've always wanted to write a children's book about mathematics because it's such an important topic. He'd also been a primary teacher, and he used to be really bad at math when he was a kid, and he said, that's why I wanted to teach it so well, to not give children the fear I and he said, I've been wanting to make a book like that, but I can do the math part, so we decided to do it together. And I also really like the tech line of your podcast, because it's really a story. And I really strongly believe in story. So it's a story about a class or this one kid who's always fun, but also a bit loud, and he has to stay after school, and he has two teachers, one male, one female, and they sort of forget that he is still there, and they complain when they talk to each other about how dull the math book is and that they just hate it. Then this kid is like, yeah, wait a minute. If you hate it, what are we doing? And then the whole class starts reveling. And I think the one that really clinches the deal is that there's this quiet kid who never said anything. He says, Then stands up and he says, okay, teacher, I understand math is important, but what I've been wondering about, what has all of this to do with my life? And then the teachers make a deal with the kids, so they will do a project called meds for life, and every week, they will do one question that's asked by kids that has something to do with maths, and the entire book is every time a story about a child by Edward, and then a comic strip that is the Mad lesson which I wrote, and then Fleur who de Drew, and then there's a little extra. And what I really like is that there's all these overarching storylines. So it's about children, you know, falling in love, worrying about parents getting divorced, worrying about the climate, about refugees, all coming from very different families, and you understand their lives, and when you see their question, you're like, Yeah, that's a question this kid would have.
John Bailer
Yeah. I found this just to be just a, just a beautiful book. I mean, I really, I really love it. It's my mom was a third grade teacher for all of our lives. So, I mean, I sort of grew up with her always going, you know, trying to communicate and connect and and certainly I, I love how the the the contract is there with the kids signatures, that they're all signed up for this, that they've all enlisted in this, and the graphics are beautiful throughout so go,
Ionica Smeets
yeah, also as so, you know, I actually don't think that mad books are that bad, but we had to make it like, yeah. But I also made sure that they said, at the end of the year, we'll test you, and if you haven't learned enough, we'll get extra mad lessons, and otherwise we'll get a party with mathematics. So there's a bit, but yeah, the rest is mainly a story.
John Bailer
So, so you know that, unfortunately, we could only get one chapter in English. I mean, you know Yannick. I mean, we're, we're, you know, you left us hanging here. It's, you know, but, but we're, we'll wait for the the that to come out in the future. I did like that. The we did get to be introduced to a couple of the questions that the students had had posed, you know, one with, can you have a bathtub in your own tears, and the other a comparison of train versus airplane to go. So can you talk about, kind of how, how you helped deconstruct these questions in part with, in collaboration with the illustrator,
Ionica Smeets
yeah, so also how we got to the question. So we actually got questions from real kids, but we also made sure that all the Mad stuff that kids around 11 need to know is in there somewhere, but the can you have bad in your own tears? Edward asked this when he was a kid to his teacher and they told him, like, that's not mathematics.
John Bailer
Oh no, oh no,
Ionica Smeets
yeah. Then so what we do in the book, we talk about, like, how much do you cry? And then, of course, the boys are like, hi, it's crying. It's for girls. And then, indeed, we do see that after a certain age, which is quite young, like men cry must much less than women. So then we start calculating, like, Okay, if you cry this many times, and then you can calculate, how big is one tear? And then you come to a certain amount. But then like, yeah, how does that compare to a bathtub? So we talk thinking about milk cartons, like, how many is it? And then the end, it turns out that with your own tears as a woman, a. Who cries a lot, you still don't get to 1/4 of your bed top. So then three friends think about joining up and adding all their tears together. And so I think one I really like that you couldn't see because it hasn't been translated. Where we really worked well with the illustrator is where we did a version of Nim, like the classic game where you take away objects, and the one who takes the last one loses. And we really talked a long time about which objects to use. And I knew a British mathematician who did something like this with candies in schools, and then something that tasted terrible as the last one. And then the illustrator said, We should do bus a Brussels sprouts, which is like the Dutch horror vegetable, like it makes you very motivated not to have to take the last one. So it's 20 chocolates and one brussels sprouts, and then you take one, two or three at a time, and and that was and he said, it's also nice to draw, because they're all round, and then it looks very nice. And then the chocolates can be very colorful, and then there's this slightly bigger greeting. And then what was really fun, I did a book tour, and then I played this game with dozens of kids with a real Brussels Oh, no,
John Bailer
did you ever get the brussels sprout?
Ionica Smeets
Well, there's a winning strategy. So of course, I didn't, no mercy for the
John Bailer
children. Note to self, don't, don't play games with Brussels sprouts with januk.
Rosemary Pennington
So that's having worked on this book. Did it sort of, did it open up your eyes like other kinds of creative possibilities for sort of engaging in science communication like I. I loved the this chapter. You know, I was someone who had terrible math classes. Sorry, teachers but, but I think if they'd been presented in this way, where it felt like connected to my life and was illustrated and didn't feel so serious, I think my relationship to math could have been very different. And so I'm just curious, as you've worked on this, have you been thinking like, what are some other creative or interesting ways you might engage in this work?
Ionica Smeets
Yeah, so we really wanted to make a book for children who loved reading but hate mathematics. One thing that I discovered the book works also the other way around. So kids who like mathematics are like, Oh, finally, there's a children's book for me, and then they end up reading I thought that was very surprising. But also I learned a lot from how Edward and flow worked very differently from me. So in science communication, you know, we've been talking about evidence, so we do tests. So pretty much all the lessons that are in the book I've tested with real kids to see, does this explanation work, and also what the kids say in these lessons when they don't understand or when they make a joke. I think 80% of that is coming from real kids I did it with, but then I talked to the otter, and he was like, I'm not gonna test stories with kids. You don't do that. But then what he did do was check with very specific kids for certain expertise. So there's a kid in there from Suriname, which is a former Dutch colony, and she has a favorite vegetable. So he went to a kid he knew from Suriname. It's like, what would you mention there? And there was this vegetable that no ethnically Dutch person knows, but all kids from Suriname know. And the artist, for instance, he really took care, that's the so he drew full page images of all the kids in their rooms that the details are really spot on. So there's a girl who moved to the Netherlands From Afghanistan after the war, and she wears a very nice dress. And she's very interested in time travel, as you can imagine. And then he checked, and then someone said, like, no, no, this dress is something that's warm in Iran, not Afghanistan, so you should have a different dress. And what I see when you so we went to schools and libraries, and you really see the eyes of kids light up when you get the details about their lives, right? So I learned a lot about it from them about and also the little jokes. I mean, there's so many jokes in the images that I still see popping up, so we have one. I think that's one of the mathematically most tough ones about scaling, about why ants are so strong. And then the square cube law. So if you make something twice as big, then the surface grows faster than the contents. And so we have that with ants, who are very strong. And then we have, like the teachers, lift an elephant. But then at some point, I think, after I'd seen the book many times, I noticed that the elephant took one of the glasses of the teacher as a joke, and I hadn't noticed it before, ends walking at the next page, still like ends do.
John Bailer
Yeah, I love the idea of easter eggs being hidden in books. That's. A that that has great appeal to me. And I also, I think that's really cool that you, you tested you, sort of you field tested your stories in this book to see how they'd be received. And then you also worked. You aspired to great precision and representing the the diversity of cultures that are part of this. I think that's that, that all, that all, is a testimony to your care as a science communicator, I think that's a so kudos to you.
Ionica Smeets
Yeah, I would say one thing that we did even more, and then the writer and artist really thought I was crazy. We also did a survey on the kids who came to our book tour, because I didn't want it to be only kids who came from parents who are both at university, who are already very excited about mathematics. And then we surveyed them. So it was a child survey with smileys, but just asking them, like, do you know a lot about science? Do you know scientists in person? Do you talk about science a lot? And then, even though we really tried to places where different groups of kids could go, we found that they had a very high science capital. So then we planned some visits to schools in neighborhoods where we thought, okay, this is where the other kids are.
John Bailer
Wow. And Did, did you see a difference in terms of kind of how their responses to the book?
Ionica Smeets
No, actually not. So I think we see that quite a lot, right? If you organize something, the people who come are not necessarily representative of the entire population, but then if you go to the other places, the response is very similar. And what I really like and what I also like about the way that you talk about maths in a bit different way, that it's not the kids who are usually the best at mathematics who do these things? Well, yeah,
John Bailer
so, so what's the next book?
Ionica Smeets
I don't know, actually, well, actually, I do know, but I only really thought of it yesterday. It's not going to be children's book. It's going to be, have you ever heard of the ulipo? No, so it's a it's a French movement who combines literature and mathematics. I'm sure you'll love it. So they have all these rules for literature. For instance, you write an entire novel without using the letter E, or you tell the same story 99 times in 99 different styles, and I'm gonna make, well, I haven't, should I tell this? I don't know. I'm gonna do something like that with a friend who is a mathematician and the comedian for adults, and we're going to do something in their tradition with very strict rules for ourselves. How to write, yeah, it's yeah. I'm not gonna say more, so you have
John Bailer
to promise to come back after that's done.,
Ionica Smeets
Yes, I will. I would love that
Rosemary Pennington
Stats and Stories is a partnership between the American Statistical Association and Miami University departments of statistics and media, journalism and film. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple podcast or other places where you find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts on the program, Send your email to statsstories@amstat.org 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.