COST Action APPLY, the European network for Argumentation and Public PoLicY analysis, is uniquely placed to investigate some of the challenges of public discourse and communication related to the COVID-19 pandemic. To better understand the obstacles linked with the COVID-19 crisis’ management, three members of this COST Action provide further insight in this special interview by COST.
Interviewees: Dr. Fabio Paglieri, Leader of the Action’s Working Group on Designing Public Argumentation and Policymaking, and an author of a contribution to The Pandemic of Argumentation volume (Springer). Dr. Steve Oswald, Vice-Chair of the Action, and the lead editor of The Pandemic of Argumentation volume (Springer). Dr. Marcin Lewinski, Chair of the Action, co-editor and an author of a contribution to The Pandemic of Argumentation volume (Springer).
In what ways have science communication and public policy been mismanaged in the case of COVID-19 context:
COST Action APPLY: First, the fact that the public is sometimes resistant to complying with frequent and occasionally unclear or contradicting directives is neither surprising nor particularly alarming. On several occasions greater compliance would be valuable to curtail the pandemic, for practical reasons, yet in principle it is not a bad thing that citizens show some resistance to any authoritarian shift in policymaking. In the current situation that shift has been motivated by legitimate healthcare concerns, which is what makes it acceptable; yet citizens should remain vigilant on this, and we should not be unduly alarmed when signs of that vigilance emerge in public debate. Keeping the door open to reasonable dissent is one of the core principles of good argumentation and remaining vigilant on any abuse of authority does not make someone a conspiracy theorist. As Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said: “Emergency powers should not be a weapon governments can wield to quash dissent, control the population, and even perpetuate their time in power. They should be used to cope effectively with the pandemic – nothing more, nothing less.”
As for failures in science communication during the COVID-19 emergency, three main interconnected issues stand out, from an argumentative perspective:
- a lack of coordination among key agencies, both within and across national borders;
- an oversimplified approach to managing the many uncertainties related to the pandemic and to the policies to curtail it;
- incoherent and less than transparent treatment of the inescapable dilemmas public authorities faced during the pandemic, such as the one between prioritizing health via hard lockdowns and prioritizing economy via minimal disturbance to social and economic activity.
The first problem is mostly organizational. Some careful institutional change is needed, to make sure that the authorities manage to speak more consistently and clearly to the public on such issues. The second and third problems are deeper. Despite the radical uncertainty associated with a novel and complex phenomenon like this pandemic, most authorities chose to formulate their claims without mentioning alternative solutions. This was probably done under the mistaken assumption that stating something with certainty is the only way of persuading the public and assuaging their concerns. But this was bound to backfire as soon as reality caught up with this pretension of certainty and previously adopted measures turned out to be wrong or at least sub-optimal. Think of how facemasks initially were described as non-essential to curtail contagion, whereas now they are one of the few things set in stone when it comes to safety measures. The point is that, under conditions of uncertainty, itis perfectly possible, and even frequent, to be wrong for the right reasons. To make a decision that is reasonable given extant evidence, and yet it is later proven to fail. But if you present that decision publicly as the only reasonable option, based on indisputable evidence and tacitly assumed values, then you will not have any justification for subsequent changes of policy, other than admitting you made a grievous mistake. Uncertainty is manageable, but to do that it needs first to be publicly acknowledged. That happened rarely in public communication about the pandemic.
What about the vaccination campaign specifically?
COST Action APPLY: The three problems outlined above were a major problem, with an excessive tendency to blame any misunderstanding or hesitation on the public and its biases – as if the rest of the population, experts and policy makers included, were not prone to those very same biases. This led to ignore that many of the concerns fueling vaccine hesitancy were coming from potentially legitimate sources of information: the so-called Great Barrington Declaration, signed by prominent medical experts from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, or the suspicions of the Nobel prize Luc Montagnier on the origins of the virus., Saying that these sources are “legitimate” does not mean that they are correct, of course, just that laypeople cannot be considered unreasonable just for listening to them. This kind of dissent and disagreement, which is always an integral part of scientific discourse, needs to be managed by institutions at the communicative level. Simply stating that some sources are wrong and those who listened to them are fools will not work. In fact, it will only exacerbate polarization and distrust in the authorities, which is exactly what often happened in recent months. Further, early in 2021 the AstraZeneca vaccine was authorized in most European countries only for the population under 60 years of age. Then authorized only for the population above 60 years of age (as new evidence has demonstrated a very limited risk of unusual blood clots in specific sections of the younger population). Over and above fanciful but viral conspiracy theories – that COVID-19 vaccines are used to subversively experiment on Black Americans or as a cover for inserting microchips to monitor global citizens via a scheme developed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – such events, poorly managed by public authorities, undermined the positive effects of the vaccination campaign.
“One of the key problems that emerged in public communication (institutional and media discourse) was the use and the credibility of expertise in a situation of scientific uncertainty.“
What could be the main conclusions from the volume “the Pandemic Argumentation” about the way we argue about the pandemic?
COST Action APPLY: The first aspect that emerges from this overview of pandemic argumentation is the general and widespread lack of reasonableness in argumentative discourse over COVID-19 that several countries have witnessed in media and institutional discourse – and this, despite the variety of approaches to crisis management exhibited by institutions and governments worldwide. From basic issues such as labeling (which deaths should count as a COVID-19 death?) to the justification of health policy and regulatory practices, and the crafting of argumentative messages meant to encourage policy observance, individuals and institutions seem to have struggled to produce sound justifications. Related to this last point, several chapters of the volume assess the way in which conspiracy theories hurt public argumentation and propose ways to counter such problematic discourses. This, in turns, calls for more efforts devoted to the development of argumentative literacy skills, some of which are discussed in detail in the 3rd part of the volume. One of the ideas that is discussed by many authors in this respect is to promote healthy and rigorous assessment of trust in authorities and experts. This should go along with a faithful representation of the latter in public discourse. The second conclusion is related to the two dimensions of expert communication, namely the production of expert discourse and the reception/evaluation of expert discourse. Several chapters show that one of the key problems that emerged in public communication (institutional and media discourse) was the use and the credibility of expertise in a situation of scientific uncertainty. Not only were experts sometimes shown as defending contradictory ideas and measures, but discussions which usually took place behind academic walls sometimes ended up taking place in the public sphere. Moreover, the inevitable (and relative) state of ignorance in which scientific knowledge found itself at the beginning of the pandemic was not publicly acknowledged enough in institutional discourse (and policymaking in particular). Consequently, experts looked weak. Those who openly acknowledged uncertainty seemed ignorant, while those who issued strong claims were often proven wrong, in the end.
Official public discourse struggled to better assert and explain the nature of uncertainty typical of such complex issues, thus unwillingly undermining the public credibility of experts. What transpires from the studies devoted to scientific expertise is the following:
(i) during the pandemic, members of the public have been exposed to biased representations of what scientific expertise actually is;
(ii) the relationship between expertise and policymaking (even lawmaking) is much more intricate than what we presumably thought, and should be better managed, starting with more faithful representations of scientific research and researchers;
(iii) scientific expertise had been (mis)used, throughout the pandemic, by institutions and individuals in decision-making processes.
A third conclusion we could draw from the research presented in the volume has to do with the need for ameliorative action of communicative practices, which should be conducive to improvements in decision-making processes.
“The truly decisive change would be to better educate the public on how to argue and reason.“
Were there any major changes identified in the current situation VS the argumentative literacy to help in countering problematic public discourses?
COST Action APPLY: On top of the recommendations we already mentioned, the truly decisive change would be to better educate the public on how to argue and reason. This in turn entails rethinking part of the educational system, which is of course a huge long-term challenge. In fact, critical thinking education, which originally was mostly confined to North America and the United Kingdom, is now a vibrant area of research across the world, and several countries have taken steps to incorporate it in their curricula. However, attempts in that direction are still relatively disorganized and scattered across different countries, without a clear understanding of how to make it work in systematic fashion. Some of those educational interventions were designed to deal with public discourse in a different era when social media were not yet so prominent in shaping complex communicative interactions. How to adapt some of those ideas to the new context is still an open challenge. Redesigning critical thinking education on a more ambitious scale and with clear connections to the new media ecology is certainly a key step towards improving argumentation in public debate. We need better arguments, yet the only way of reliably getting them is to train the next generation to be better arguers, that is why Education is the key.
Another approach to increasing argumentative literacy in the times of social media is to intervene directly on the social media itself. We have seen institutional efforts to require platforms such as Twitter or Facebook to block, flag or remove unsubstantiated claims and conspirational fake news. Further, various fact-checking initiatives such as snopes.com support critical media literacy. Several members of our COST Action are involved in developing tools not just for fact checking, but for argument checking, via online tools aiding in identifying arguments (the so-called argument-mining) and assessing their quality across social media.
What is the expected impact of ‘the Pandemic Argumentation’ at the academic and at policy levels? => Could you please share the link/page where it will be accessible.
COST Action Apply: We expect the volume to achieve wide circulation. While scholars interested in the argumentative dimension of pandemic communication will obviously constitute the first targeted readership, we also expect the public to find relevant information in the volume, mainly because it contains many case studies that people might relate to, but also because it offers interesting advice to learn about ways of countering misinformation. Policy-makers should also be able to draw parallels between the cases presented therein and pick on the crucial aspects that public policy has often failed to effectively manage in the way it has responded to the challenges of the pandemic (notably in terms of information campaigns related to vaccinations, promotion of safety measures, etc.)
While the volume is not meant as a communication manual which provides guidelines and a list of best practices, policy makers will find:
(i) a careful description of specific aspects of policy making that should particularly be paid attention to in the crafting of messages, such as the nature, role and representation of expert opinion, the representation of alternative (anti-scientific consensus) opinions, types of arguments to use in contexts of uncertainty;
(ii) a principled explanation of how and why these aspects play an important role in reaching the intended audience of these messages,
(iii) a far-reaching and rich set of argumentative resources that can be implemented to improve the communication of public policy.
“This reveals a certain problem in the way hard sciences – epidemiology, virology, medicine, genetics – and social sciences and humanities communicate with each other in understanding the science-society interface for the purposes of public policymaking. “
What were the participants’ reaction to the webinar “Public engagement beyond COVID – Where do we go from here?”, jointly organized by the European Science Engagement Association (EUSEA) and the COST Cross-Cutting Activity (CCA) on Science Communication?
COST Action Apply: This event was organized at the time when we were reviewing and revising the contributions to the Pandemic of Argumentation volume. The event itself highlighted various problems of science communication during the times of COVID-19 that we could then corroborate (or challenge!) with several authors in the volume. For instance, Professor Marcel Tanner, President of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences and a well-known epidemiologist, was generous enough to explain some of the intricacies involved in officially counting the victims of COVID-19 and communicating the numbers to the public. (Who died of COVID-19, and not simply with COVID-19 but due to other comorbidity such as diabetes, is one of the key questions in understanding and tackling the pandemic.) Apart from this direct scientific input, this event partly inspired the leaders of the Action to organize on September 6, 2021, an Online Day of the European Conference of Argumentation: Viral Arguments: Public Discourse in A Pandemic Age (see here).The speakers included two lead authors of The COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Handbook. A practical guide for improving vaccine communication and fighting misinformation (available at: https://sks.to/c19vax): Stephan Lewandowsky (U. of Bristol) and Ulrike Hahn (U. of London). This online conference, with some 100 registered participants, further investigated communication of science in the times of pandemic with various participants taking note of our COST Action and contributing to the next Grant Period.
What collaborations do you have in “Network of Actions on COVID”? If there are none, which ones would you wish for?
COST Action Apply: Apart from the CCA on Science Communication not much. This reveals a certain problem in the way hard sciences – epidemiology, virology, medicine, genetics – and social sciences and humanities communicate with each other in understanding the science-society interface for the purposes of public policymaking.
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