WHEN YOU ASSUME: RESULTS AND REFLECTIONS FROM STUDIES ON PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF GENETICS

From my perspective, science communication goes beyond the mere transmission of information from experts to non-experts. Science communication is dynamic and influenced by personal characteristics and sociopolitical context. As scientists, we not only need to know our audience but also understand ourselves better. The main topics of this presentation are (i) literacy and the use of jargon when talking about genetics; and (ii) specific cognitive biases in how we process information about genetics, including how personal values and experiences can influence how we understand scientific information.

The talk will be structured in two sections: The first section synthesises our previous work on public understanding of genetics. First, I will discuss a survey study on genetic literacy and public attitudes towards genetic testing in mental health. In this study, we surveyed families that had previously participated in genetic research studies at QIMR Berghofer, Australia (N=3,974), and the general population from the U.K. (N=501) and the U.S. (N=500). Results showed a high interest in psychiatric genetic testing, but the potential for negative impact of such information is also high, with more than a third of the participants showing serious concerns relating to learning about personal genetic predisposition. Concerns were mitigated by higher levels of genetic literacy, leading to less worry about coping with learning about a high genetic predisposition for several mental health problems and less prejudice against people with a high genetic predisposition. Second, I will discuss our recent review on online media articles covering genome-wide association studies (GWAS). We show that we might be missing a major opportunity for increasing general knowledge about genetic findings. Indeed, ∼95% of the news sites and blogs on GWAS used a language too complex to be understood by most adults. Most news articles used the terms ‘RNA’, ‘risk’, ‘gene’, ‘genome’, and ‘DNA’, while the terms ‘marker, ‘polymorphism’, or ‘allele’, rarely appeared. To contextualise these results, I will present new data from our survey showing the results from a modified version of the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Genetics (REAL-G), which evaluates how familiar the public is with the terms ‘genetics’, ‘chromosome’, ‘susceptibility’, ‘mutation’, ‘genetic variant’, ‘heredity’, and ‘polygenic’. I will briefly touch on the concept of ‘framing’, or how interpretation of information can be influenced by the presence or absence of certain words or images. For example, media on GWAS tends to focus on ‘risk’ (mentioned in 63.7% of articles) versus ‘susceptibility’ (12.2%) or ‘protect’ (11.3%) – the stem of words such as ‘protective’.

In the second section, I will discuss previous research on genetic determinism as a cognitive bias, as well as the role of motivated cognition. That is, we are not passive or even objective recipients of scientific information, but rather we strategically choose facts that align with our goals or ignore particularly threatening information. I will frame this work from the perspective of current research on public attitudes towards climate change, which arguably has become the most prolific discipline in science communication research in recent times. I will finish the presentation mentioning some examples of good practices in the field, including the consultation process to recontact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at QIMR Berghofer.