Inaccessible and Misinterpreted: Understanding Science in Today's World

Scientific journals are exceptionally inaccessible, both in terms of their language and their expense to the public. Due to this isolation of the scientific community, many people blindly trust scientists without really... [ view full abstract ]

Scientific journals are exceptionally inaccessible, both in terms of their language and their expense to the public. Due to this isolation of the scientific community, many people blindly trust scientists without really understanding the primary material. Coupled with the current administration’s distrust of science—evidenced by President Trump’s comments on environmental science and autism as well as his detrimental actions towards science over the past year—people already do or may begin to doubt the necessity of research. Here, I study two neuroscience articles that have been covered by popular press, one investigating gender differences in prosocial behavior and the other exploring neural correlates of religious experience, in order to explore the principal way in which the general population accesses science. Much of the new sources’ writing seems to be a short, simple summary of the articles. However, with a closer look, there are discrepancies that must be addressed in order to instill the majority of the population with a critical yet knowledgeable appreciation for the scientific process. In this paper, I will propose several ways in which journalist and scientific communities should respectively make efforts to avoid misconceptions of research and become more accessible to the general public.