Hi there! This is TITLE-ABS-KEY(“science journalism“), a newsletter about science journalism research. In the previous issue, I practiced my jokes around human and automated science journalists as well as polite ways to express astonishment.
Today, I’ve got an awesome paper lined up — also literally.
Today’s paper: Landrum, Asheley R., et al. "When Science Journalism is Awesome: Measuring Audiences’ Experiences of Awe from Reading Science Stories." Journalism Practice (2022): 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2022.2116724
Why this paper: Do I really need a reason to pick a paper that has Science Journalism is Awesome in the title? Didn’t think so.
Abstract: In collaboration with professional science journalists, we conducted a national online survey (N = 2,088) to explore facets of awe as potential response states to science journalism and how audiences’ dispositional science curiosity may influence these response states. Our science journalist collaborators identified several “awe-inducing” articles as well as a “business-as-usual” article to use in the survey, and we measured participants’ experiences of awe using the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S). We replicated the factor structure of the AWE-S and found that participants’ generally experienced greater awe from reading the “awe-inducing” science articles compared to the “business-as-usual” one. Only partial support for the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects model was found. Although we found that greater science curiosity predicted greater awe reactions to science journalism, science curiosity did not moderate the relationship between type of article read and experiences of awe. Together, these results demonstrate that audiences can experience awe from reading science journalism and the AWE-S is a good way to capture this emotion for media psychology research.
Reader, I was genuinely hoping the body of this paper would just look like this:
But alas, there’s research, limitations and all. So let’s dive in.
Awe is increasingly a focus of science communication researchers and practitioners seeking to engage science media audiences more effectively. A positive, epistemic, emotional state, awe is often described as occurring when one experiences vastness and as a result needs to accommodate new information into pre-existing mental schemas.
Now that’s a proper description of awe, one that’s somewhat less intimidating, religious or sugary than the Russian words трепет or восторг which are typically used to translate it. I really like the “experiencing vastness“ part of it; most awesome, awe-inspiring things I’ve seen or heard or touched in my life are indeed larger than the human scale. And yes, it is a strategic feeling to tap into for science communication, not least because many challenges we’re facing are also much larger than any one of us — but not than all of us together.
Given the potential role of awe in engaging audiences, this study examines the extent to which audiences report experiencing awe from reading science journalism that strives to be awe-inspiring.
And I’m truly delighted to report that actual science journalists were involved in this study! The authors asked a bunch of KQED Science reporters to pick a few stories that they thought would elicit awe in different ways along the facets of something called the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S). Just imagine if meerkats were consulted for all those studies and not just creepily observed for weeks.
You can read the stories the journalists chose here. I have to warn you, though, that, to me, the first one, about Tahlequah the orca, is less awe and more heartbreak that still hurts to read about years after it happened. (You may already know what I’m talking about, so I’ll just quickly tell you she went on to give birth to a healthy calf in 2020.) Also, I am fascinated by the fact that the control article, a ‘business-as-usual‘ one that was not supposed to elicit awe, was about, and I’m not joking, A FUNGUS THAT KILLED MILLIONS OF BATS. You can tell the bar for awe is set really high in our line of work.
So what is AWE-S? It’s essentially a way to unpack awe, a rather holistic experience which everyone may understand wildly differently, into more specific feelings and thoughts that would be easier to ask study participants about. AWE-S includes six facets: vastness (either in space or time), need for accommodation (when you can’t grasp something without adjusting your mental scale), time perception (when a really awesome moment feels like slo-mo), self-diminishment (when you just feel so small in the face of something), connectedness (when you may be small, sure, but you’re also part of a bigger whole), and physical sensations (goosebumps!). Unfortunately COVID-19 interfered with goosebumps-measuring experiments in the lab, so the team focused on the other five facets.
The 2,000-plus participants of the survey were randomly assigned to read one of the stories and then answered quite a few questions, including the AWE-S and other measures, a blunt question on whether they experienced awe while reading, and a prompt to choose the Facebook reaction that most closely described their reaction to the story (if I understood it right, the SMM people for KQED wanted to know whether “wow“, or 😲, means the reader found themselves in awe; according to the paper, this is a common assumption but other suggested meanings include shock or surprise, being impressed, and even disdain and skepticism).
All this was done to validate the AWE-S as a scale for reading news articles (it had been used only for videos and writing about experiences) and then see how it worked with the stories the journalists had chosen. So, how did it work?
Generally, we found that the facets from the AWE-S correlate with a direct question asking participants whether they experienced awe, but that the “wow” reaction may not be a strong indicator of awe. Additionally, we found that high science curiosity significantly predicted experiencing awe from reading the science story, but it did not consistently moderate the relationship between condition — i.e., which story the participants were randomly assigned to read — and their experiences of awe.
A few observations: first, I’ve been telling students since forever that curiosity is a self-reinforcing trait, i.e. the more naturally curious you are (or, rather, the more curiosity you have left in you after years and years of warnings about cat killing), the more likely you are to discover, well, awesome things which will make you even more curious. Thus, I feel seen.
Second, duh on the ‘wow’ reaction. I wonder whether there is any research from Facebook itself on what users tend to mean when they pick it; I found at least one paper on click-based reactions to posts about research that interprets 😲 as positive sentiment but even anecdotally I have ample evidence that it’s just a total mess.
Third, naturally, it was not guaranteed that what the science journalists found to be awe-inducing would be awe-inducing in a general population
. Journalists are toughened and seasoned by exposure to what’s essentially a firehose of astonishing stories; it’s highly unlikely this does not affect their judgment. No wonder even the supposedly ‘business-as-usual’ story about a murderous fungus scored moderately (and not low) on awe with actual readers.
Fourth, and this is the biggest takeaway I think: when I read the stories KQED Science people had picked, I was slightly surprised — and concerned — that they were not your typical “gee whiz“ stories about (artificially) colorful galaxies, extremely cool robots or at the very least tiny frogs being bad at jumping. For goodness’ sake, one of them is about a mother who carried her dead newborn around for over two weeks, and another is about doctors struggling with informing people their loved ones have died. I know Inside Out has taught us all about complex emotions, but — Christ on a bike these are just so sad. I was particularly surprised because, having had a look at the dimensions of awe in the paper, I thought most of them felt positive (and indeed, the authors write that all but one of them — self-diminishment — were significantly associated with a positive reaction to the story measured in a different way). The sad stories ended up eliciting the greatest “awe” scores; [i]t is possible that there are more uplifting stories that may also elicit awe in audiences, and it is possible that they may vary from the sad ones. Future research could investigate this.
Yes, please, further research, so much further research is needed on the myriad of ways in which science journalism is awesome.
That’s it! If you enjoyed this issue, let me know. If you also have opinions or would like to suggest a paper for me to read in one of the next issues, you can leave a comment or just respond to the email.
Cheers! 👩🔬