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Regina Barber DeGraaff [post-production]: Welcome to Spark Science, where we share stories of human curiosity. I’m your host, Regina Barbara DeGraaff, an astrophysicist at Western Washington University.

Today, we are talking about the science behind science communication. Our guest is Dr. Sara Yeo, and she studies how humor is used to communicate scientific information on social media. We also discussed various emotions that come up when attempting to persuade somebody to trust science, which is sadly always a relevant topic.

We hope you enjoy our meta-conversation about what research says about how science is shared.

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Regina: Today we’re going to talk about the intersection between humor and science communication. I have with me today Dr. Sara Yeo. So welcome to the show. Thank you so much for calling in.

Dr. Sara Yeo: Great to be here, thank you. I am an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah.

Regina: But you do specialize in this idea of translating science. How did you get into this field? And especially the humor part, because I love that.

Dr. Sara Yeo: So it’s actually a long convoluted story because I started my graduate–well, my undergraduate degree is an oceanography and I minored in chemistry, actually. I thought I was going to be a chemical oceanographer. My first master’s degree is in oceanography, but it turns out I’m a microbial ecologist and I studied microbial ecosystem dynamics–microbial dynamics and surface waters of the ocean in Hawaii for that.

Regina: That must have been terrible. [Regina laughs]

Dr. Sara Yeo: And then I went to University of Wisconsin because that’s what one does when one moves from Honolulu to Madison, Wisconsin. Both of which are great cities, actually.

Regina: Similar climate.

Dr. Sara Yeo: [laughing] Very similar climate. So I was actually in an environmental engineering PhD program and I was going to study similar ecosystems–aquatic ecosystems in Northern Wisconsin where there are a lot of bogs and lakes.

And while I was in that program, I took a science communication course. They had these engineering professional development courses and science communication was one of them. And I took this course, partly with Sharon Dunwoody. I think it was a co-taught course. But in any event, I found myself in a class with Sharon Dunwoody and she introduced me to science communication, and research in science communication. And I ended up switching my program entirely and I went to a small department known as Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin. And I got my master’s and my PhD there.

Regina: So, I mean, we will get into like the humor and what you were talking about–you looking at social media and how people share science. But I really want to touch on this thing right now, or this concept of science communication as an actual field. And that’s something that’s kind of new. Like in your experience, how new is that? And, like, when was the first time you heard there was an actual program dedicated to that?

Dr. Yeo: Yeah, I’d have to say that was, for me, in 2010, actually. So 2010 is when I switched into this program, so sometime between 2008 and 2010 is when I took this class that was completely eye-opening for me. And that’s kind of the first time I’d heard there was this field of research and a whole area of practice, right?

And of course when you look back, you think that’s kind of naive. Because we communicate science all the time and that, in essence, is science communication, right? We talk about science all the time. But the research in science communication was very new to me. And I think people are still kind of discovering it all the time now, right? That there is a field of research, like a subfield of communication, dedicated to studying how people come to understand science, from what they see media, from what they see online in social media.

And actually, the humorous stuff is pretty new for me. So my dissertation was primarily focused on how we select science information, based on values that we have—

Regina: Oh, the audience does?

Dr. Yeo: Yeah, yeah. And my population of interest is generally adults in the U of S, so I haven’t actually done much International work yet. And I don’t generally study people under the age of 18. Because I’m sort of interested as a whole in how the U.S. population finds information about science, right? So a lot of my dissertation work is based on people’s values, worldviews, sort of these predispositions that, you know, tend to cause us to pick science from one type of source or another.

Regina: For me personally, I’m very interested in what you’re talking about right now because there’s been a lot of programs that are very skills-based. Like, this is how you become a

science journalist. This is how you write an article. But what you’re talking about is different, right? You’re talking about how, you know, the creator of that material and the audience interact, and like how it’s actually coming through? And, you know, how effective is it? What is effective? All that kind of stuff.

Dr. Yeo: Yeah, and at my very core, I’m a social scientist, right? I study how people come to form attitudes, how they form their behavioral intentions. And I just look at how media (and specifically, media about scnc) influence that. Yeah, and it’s really interesting. There is a whole area, like you’re saying, that comes with like the skills-based course.

Regina: Practitioner-based.

Dr. Yeo: Practitioner. And so there are these sort of big camps, I think, in the field of science communication of practitioners, and then researchers. And when I say big, I actually think the practitioner camp is much larger than the researcher camp.

But then there’s also trainers, right? So there’s kind of, in this ecology of science communication, there’s like different groups. And some are more aware of others. And I think there’s really a lack of, kind of, researchers and practitioners working together and collaborating, right? For very many reasons.

Regina: Yeah. If only just like geographically and like, not being in the same department.

Dr. Yeo: Rght, yeah. And that this area of research is sometimes like, oh wait, there’s a whole area of research?

Regina: Yeah.

Dr. Yeo: You know? And so, I like to think about this. I have some colleagues, John Besley and Anthony Dudo, from Michigan State and UT Austin, who talk about this as strategic science communication.

Regina: Mmmm.

Dr. Yeo: And in some ways, it’s helpful that way, right?

Regina: I like that, I’m going to write it down.

Dr. Yeo: It’s sort of like, we don’t ever like to use the terms “public relations” or “marketing,” right? But all of this falls under sort of a broader umbrella of strategic communication.

Regina: Right.

Dr. Yeo: I think when–well, I’m still a scientist, right? I’m still a social scientist. But when I was like a… biologist or microbial ecologist, my whole way of practicing science communication when I used to do a lot of outreach events, a lot of that was based on the deficit model.

Regina: Right.

Dr. Yeo: So when I learned about the deficit model, this is like a huge epiphany for me in my graduate career. And I was like, “Well, I’ve been doing this all wrong.”

Regina: Well explain to our listeners what the deficit model is.

Dr. Yeo: Yeah, so the knowledge deficit model is predicated on this idea of scientific literacy, that populations, that adults in the U.S. should have some level of scientific literacy. And so, if they know more about the science, whatever the topic may be, they’re just going to have a better attitude about it. Or, an attitude that—

Regina: Or they’ll believe you.

Dr. Yeo: Or they’ll believe you, right? Or an attitude that aligns with what the experts think. So a really good example that I like to use is climate change. You know, sometimes we’ll say well, if people only knew about the science of climate change, they would see that the Earth is warming at an alarming rate and that it’s caused by humans, right? Anthropogenic. And that sort of nicely captures, what the deficit model looks like, right?

And because, as scientists at an institution that produces knowledge, and as a scientist that produces knowledge, if it’s just a deficit of information and a deficit of knowledge, we can really easily fill that, right? But we know that knowledge is important, but it’s not the only thing that changes people’s attitudes, or that influences people’s opinions about scientific issues.

Regina: There has to be a way it needs to get into your brain, right? Like it has to go in somehow. Or you have to be able to interact with that knowledge and there’s so many other things at play here.

Dr. Yeo: Right. And there’s actually evidence in a lot of research that shows that people who tend to be more knowledgeable about something are also better equipped to counterargue, right? So they have this sort of set view about something or an existing attitude about something. Even if you just give more information to them, the more sophisticated they are, the better equipped they are to counterargue that, to rationalize their position.

Regina: Right.

Dr. Yeo: And so, you know, we like to think of ourselves as being rational, but the truth is we’re really good rationalizers.

Regina: [laughs] That’s, that’s a, it’s a confusing sentence, but it’s totally true, right? Like, we feel like we’ll be able to give this information that seems logical to somebody else. But like you’re saying, they can rationalize that it probably isn’t true. Or it has holes. They can rationalize the holes, right?

Dr. Yeo: Right, yeah. We’re good. Our human brain is good at rationalizing the holes as you put it, right?

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Regina [narrating]: We’re speaking with Dr. Sara Yeo about how to talk to portions of the public that resist science.

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Regina: And so, to get to the point of humor, you’re saying there is this resistance. We’ve all seen it. Our listeners have seen it. You know, relatives’ skepticism that’s taken to a different level that might not be… helpful.

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So how do we get people to kind of interact with this information in a way that’s disarming? Like how do we–or like, relatable in a way that isn’t, where they’re not going to rationalize the holes, right? They’re going to be able to have fun with the information. And you’re saying, like, social media and which tweets they, you know, they like. And so can you tell us more about how you got into that and tell us more about that work?

Dr. Yeo: Yeah, so… again, a lot of my work up until I started on the humor work, and before that this more emotional work, has been a lot about cognitive ideas right? How our predispositions influence how we form attitudes. But there’s a huge literature that talks about how we use our emotions and feelings and affect, which is kind of a broader term, to make decisions, everyday decisions, and influence how we form our opinions and our attitudes, right?

And so there’s a little bit of work. So if we look at health communication, for example, the idea of a fear appeal, right? Scaring people into doing something. We can think back to the anti-smoking public service announcements and how in some countries now–so I’m from Malaysia. And in my country they still have, on cigarette boxes, very graphic images of organs that, you know, don’t look great. Like smokers’ organs that don’t look great, right?

Regina: Well let’s let’s kind of touch on that. Because I remember listening to a Hidden Brain. I’ve talked about this, I believe, on previous shows. Maybe it’s been cut. But there’s an episode on Hidden Brain called “Facts Aren’t Enough” and he talks about how, like, fear will

keep you from doing something. So having these graphic images on the cigarette box will keep you–it helps with inaction. But for action, like in climate change, and doing something that is hard to conceptualize, you have to give people hope, right? So—

Dr. Yeo: And sometimes there are these boomerang effects where it’s like, too scary, and so I just kind of, as a human being, ignore that information.

Regina: Right.

Dr. Yeo: And so there’s–you know, and this is why I think how we use emotion or how we think about emotion in science communication is kind of an empirical question, right? Because it’s like, well you want to give people hope. You don’t want to scare them too much. But what is too much, right?

Regina: Right.

Dr. Yeo: And so I recently studied, before I started on this humor work, I was studying disgust and microbiomes. And you know, a lot of microbiome information you see online is about fecal microbiota transplants. So you can look up videos of fecal microbiota transplants, FMTs, and how to do it at home; how to transplant healthy stool into somebody who has an infection, somebody who’s not healthy. To get their gut microbiome to be healthier.

Regina: Right. And that just seems like a bad idea [Dr. Yeo laughs] to be doing any sort of transplanting. It says “transplant.” Why would you do any sort of transplant at home without any medical expertise? But this is what got me to want to reach out to you. Because we were at this virtual conference and you were showing these slides of, basically, poop. And you like had the word “poop” in various places–or at least once, I remember. And I was like, “I need to talk to this person.” [laughing]So…

Dr. Yeo: Yeah, and this idea of disgust is something that–you know, emotions. When we have, when we feel emotions, they sort of generate these tendencies in us, right? Generally, they’re like approach tendencies or avoidance tendencies. And you can see how something like disgust might cause us to avoid something. And in the context of microbiomes, if–and fecal microbiota transplants, FMTs, are sort of an approved therapy, right? Not at home, but an approved therapy. And so the reaction of disgust and moving away from it might cause people to perceive more risks in the modification of microbiomes. And in fact that is what we found. If people feel more disgusted about it, they find it more risky.

Regina: But you can also use that disgust and spin it, right? And spin it into humor. Anything that is disgusting to any human, there’s a way a comedian can make it funny, right?

Dr. Yeo: There certainly could be, yeah. Somebody way funnier than I am [laughing], there’s certainly a way. And I think there’s been a couple of conversations that I should bring up here about the ethical… the ethical means of using, right? The ethical considerations of using this

type of–like using people’s emotions to get them to do something, right? Some people, like–I think sometimes this comes up in at conferences where I’ve presented this. Practitioners in particular are sort of like, well, is it ethical to use an emotion to make people feel something to then change their opinion about something?

Regina: Yeah, and I actually asked that question at the conference. And I think it was a good answer. It’s not that we’re using somebody’s emotions; that we’re being aware of those emotions, right? There is a fine line between being aware and navigating those emotions versus using emotions, right?

Dr. Yeo: Right. There is a goal for your further–the reason you communicate science, there is a goal for that. And achieving that goal and knowing how emotions can help you achieve that goal, and understanding that, I think, is powerful.

And it’s the same idea with using humor, right? There’s quite often recommendations to use humor when communicating about science because intuitively we feel like that’s something that would be useful, that would help, that would make science more accessible and more acceptable to others.

But we don’t actually have a ton of empirical evidence about that. [Regina laughs] And if we look on social media at the types of science humor… so I showed a couple of example at this virtual conference. So #overlyhonestmethods is one… #reviewforscience. These are some of the hashtags that people use. And #fieldworkfail. A lot of these are satirical.

Regina: Can you tell us those hashtags one more time?

Dr. Yeo: Yeah, so it’s the hashtag #overlyhonestmethods… #fieldworkfail… and there’s #reviewforscience. And I’m sure there are other ones, but these were sort of the ones that stood out to me, #overlyhonestmethods in particular. And this is actually what started me on this, like, track of humor. Because in other communication literatures and other subfield–like political communication, you can imagine there’s been quite a bit done on humor in political communication because of Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert. And what researchers find is that—

Regina: Samantha Bee. I just want to name a lady. [Regina laughs]

Dr. Yeo: Right, yeah, Samantha Bee. This is true. A lot of the research was actually done prior to Samantha Bee.

Regina: Okay.

Dr. Yeo: But I like that we’re bringing her up, too, because I think she’s pretty hilarious. But, so a lot of this research shows that satirical content can sometimes undermine trust in political institutions and political actors, right? And so, you know, when I look at science

communication and I look at hashtags like #overlyhonestmethods, which are researchers just being very frank, you know, and satirical–funny–about the methods that they’re using, right? But if you’re not an expert in something, or if you’re not a scientist yourself, that might look different to you, right? Does that then undermine one’s trust in science, one’s confidence in scientists. These are empirical questions that I think we haven’t necessarily asked yet.

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Regina [narrating]: This is Spark Science, and we’re talking to Dr. Yeo, a science communication researcher at the University of Utah.

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Regina: …Well I think it goes deeper than that, right? Like it goes to the point where you were asking is it ethical to, you know, use people’s emotions? I think it’s, I personally think it’s in-ethical to ignore that there are emotions involved entirely, right? I mean, in my opinion, isn’t that in-ethical? And then when you were saying, when there are people who it might undermine our expertise, well that goes–that’s a much deeper issue with the scientist stereotype. That we know everything. That, you know, only certain people are scientists and they look like this. And if we don’t look like this, then that also undermines how our message is being perceived. So I think that that–everything’s all connected. So, how do you disentangle that, right?

Dr. Yeo: Yeah, yeah. And it’s a really great point about, you know, sort of who is seen as a scientist, right? And that is a… large ship to turn.

Regina: Yeah.

Dr. Yeo: A very thorny problem.

Regina: That’s apparently the mountain I’m going to die on. But…

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But can you give us some examples? Like for our listeners, give us like a story that kind of we can relate to, or we can kind of–give us an example of what you mean by the humor that’s being used online right now.

Dr. Yeo: Yeah. So if you’ve looked up any sort of jokes about humor ocience, you’ll see that a lot of them, actually, are satire. So again, like #overlyhonestmethods or #reviewforscience. But then a lot of them are also things like wordplay and anthropomorphism, right? So anthropomorphism, the idea of giving inanimate objects human characteristics. And wordplays, so puns and, you know, different meanings, or same pronunciation and different

meanings. So think about the very common meme, “cellfie” spelled with a “C”. Like, C-E-L-L-F-I-E.

Regina: I see, yes.

Dr. Yeo: And there’s a cell taking–yeah. So these are like really common jokes. And actually, some of our first experiments were using this type of content. Identifying the types of humor in it and then taking parts of it out. And then looking at how, sort of, knowledge plays a role in that. Because we started, in terms of science and science jokes, k’s sort of important that we know a little bit about science in order to get the joke, right?

Regina: Right.

Dr. Yeo: And so this has like a lot of implications for how we process that information, how deeply we think about it, right? And I just think it’s really funny. So when we were doing all this and trying to characterize the types of humor that was in online and social media content, we came across a lot of jokes. And a lot of them–I had a couple of undergraduates coding and some graduate students, and most of them were in communication, not trained as, like, bench scientists or field scientists. And I’m trained as a field and bench scientist and I guess I thought a lot of it was funnier than other people. Than what my students thought, right?

So I would give these presentations and I’d be showing them these science jokes and memes, and they’d all be kind of sitting there stone-faced. They didn’t think it was very funny. And I’d kind of be at the podium laughing to myself about these jokes, right?

Regina: Well, that’s a really good point. I want to bring that up, like this idea of what is funny. There isn’t a universal “this is funny.” That’s a fact. Like, for instance, I used to listen to StarTalk a lot, and there’s a comedian called Eugene Mirman. I don’t know if you’re aware of who Eugene Mirman is. He’s the voice of Eugene in Bob’s Burgers as well.

Dr. Yeo: Oh. Yes, now I know.

Regina: And they were interviewing a nutritionalist. And she was saying something like, you know, they were talking about how in different parts of the world, the smaller people who are actually physically smaller in stature, live longer. And they were being all very serious. And then this comedian goes, “Yeah, that’s why babies live forever.” And I almost fell over. I was on a treadmill and I, like, almost had a horrible accident. And I find, I couldn’t even handle how funny that was. But the nutritionalist lady was not laughing at all [laughing]. She did not find that funny.

And like, everything is cultural, right? Like, what we find–maybe people in the Midwest. People in, you know, Pacific Northwest. Maybe people who are from different cultural backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds. So how are you studying that, or is anyone studying that part? Like, what works? What doesn’t?

Dr. Yeo: Yeah, so I don’t know of anybody. I mean, there have been people who’ve studied emotions in different cultures. And emotion theorists are still sort of arguing about whether emotions are universal or not, right? There’s different camps. In terms of humor, the way my research team kind of, we deal with that subjectivity of what is funny is we actually measure and ask them to say how funny they thought that was, right?

Regina: Oh wow! [Regina laughs]

Dr. Yeo: And it was really interesting, because—

Regina: What is the scale? Like, what do you mean?

Dr. Yeo: Yeah, so it’s a self-reported scale. “Did you find this,” like, “the extent to which you found this? Not funny, funny,” right? [Regina laughs] And in fact we’ve actually included lame recently as one of the wow options.

Regina: Oh wow.

Dr. Yeo: Because some people find nerdy science jokes not funny and lame, right? And in fact—

Regina: Yeah. Which is an issue with accessibility terms though, so…

Dr. Yeo: Right, yeah. So when we look at sort of, in our statistical models, when we look at it, people who don’t find that content funny, they actually have negative effects on how they perceive the scientist. And whether they want to follow more science on social media. It actually has negative effects if they don’t find it funny at all.

Regina: Right. And it’s not only cultural but it’s also generational.

Dr. Yeo: Right.

Regina: I was just thinking about this and how they humor that I grew up on was very, like, Conan O’Brien Simpsons humor. And that just isn’t the humor of 20-year-olds now, or 20-something-year-olds.

Dr. Yeo: Right.

Regina: So it’s very, like, I’ll say a joke and they’ll be like, “That’s not funny.”

Dr. Yeo: Right, and a lot of insider… a lot of insider slang and content, you know? And even in science knowledge, there’s a whole different domain of insider content.

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Regina [narrating]: I’d like to thank Dr. Yeo for taking the time to speak with me about the science behind science communication. If you’d like to know more about her work, follow her on Twitter at SaraKYeo. That is S-A-R-A-K-Y-E-O.

Spark Science is produced in collaboration with KMRE and Western Washington University. Today’s episode was recorded in Bellingham, Washington in my house, on my computer, during the 2020 statewide homestay order. Our producers are Suzanne Blais and myself, Regina Barber DeGraaff. Our audio engineer is Zerach Coakley.

If you missed any of our show, go to our website, sparksciencenow.com. And if there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us a message on Twitter or Facebook at SparkScienceNow. Thank you for listening to Spark Science.

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