‘Good writing is about being able to toggle between the personal and the universal’

I heard Chris Smith, from the Naked Scientists, on the radio the other day. He was saying scientists just aren't trained to do communication. While that may still be generally true in a formal sense, I do feel like there are lots of resources and opportunities available…

There are so many more outlets… like The Conversation, Aeon, obviously The Psychologist has been around for a long time to provide that. Scientists can start their own Substack, blogs, all of this. So there are the opportunities to put it into practice, and I do think a lot of scientists can communicate really clearly. They're very aware of talking at the right level of expertise for their audience, without patronising them. But perhaps there isn't the training in things like narrative, which is really important for communicating stuff… for example, how you draw someone's attention through quite a long feature to make it feel a rewarding journey by the end.

And that's not just about the journey they're on while they're reading – narrative techniques make a piece more memorable.

Exactly. Think of that famous Daniel Kahneman experiment where people put in their hands in cold water… raising the temperature just slightly at the end makes people remember the experience so much more positively. How you feel at the end of an experience is how you'll remember it. With writing the same applies. If you get to the end of the feature, it's been great but then you're disappointed… that's a real missed opportunity. The whole point of the narrative is raising some kind of question at the beginning that is then resolved by the end. You engineer the whole story so that by the end, that peak of curiosity that you've created is satisfied. Sometimes I do read features that lack that punch, the reward of knowing that you've had your questions answered.

I guess that's partly because in a formal academic way of writing, or speaking at a conference, the conclusion is so often 'more research is needed'.

Which you could say about literally any science. It's fine, actually, to acknowledge that there are lots of questions to be resolved… but I think you have to raise at least one question at the beginning that has been answered.

I do think that one of the changes I've seen over the years is Psychologists becoming more comfortable with saying 'We don't know. But this is why we don't know.'

Exactly. There's a misconception that science communication has to simplify a story. I don't think that's necessarily the case. If you're a good storyteller, you can incorporate the nuances into the narrative. There can be tangents, or it can be a point of tension in the story if there are contradictory results. And at the end of a piece, even if you can't answer the question you raised at the beginning, a good ending might point to some forthcoming research that will answer it. You're letting readers know this is an important topic to keep an eye on in future.

You mention points of tension. Is that the same as 'turning points' being important in narrative?

Yeah, exactly. In science, people might have been looking in completely the wrong direction for an answer. Or there might be two researchers who fundamentally disagree about how to interpret something. Lisa Feldman Barrett does that really well in How Emotions Are Made. She's got strong opinions on what emotions are, and her research does contradict a lot of ideas like universal emotions and the somatic marker hypothesis. She's very upfront with that, and I think that's an honest way of reporting her own research. But it's also quite satisfying for readers to recognise what the alternatives are and why she thinks she's right. So, as a scientist writing about research, you don't have to agree with the other person. You can respectfully say why you think they're wrong.

I've always tried to get Psychologists to, in the words of Mick Billig, 'repopulate' their work – put themselves in, put the voices of actual concrete people from their work in. But I think that remains one of the storytelling techniques that many scientists are still most uncomfortable with – the 'scientist as character' – even though it must be beyond doubt that's an effective way to communicate.

It really is, and it doesn't have to be some confessional memoir to work. Sometimes scientists are quite reluctant to even say 'I was surprised by these results', or 'I was shocked', or 'I was suspicious'. But it's very engaging for the reader to know that researchers aren't these purely objective automatons… there has to be emotion. I guess a lot of research is quite frustrating and boring, but when you do have those moments of excitement, it's nice to communicate that.

I think of Marion Roach in her memoir, where she says about writing, 'Let us into your story by shedding light on our own dilemmas, fears, happiness, or wide-eyed wonder. …You have to give readers a reason for this thing to live on in their hearts and minds.'

And I think that's as true in conversation as it is in writing. It's something I thought about a lot in writing The Laws of Connection – this idea of shared reality, and how the only way you can connect is to know what's going on in someone else's mind. 

It's funny actually, because you write a fair bit about the 'liking gap' – how we underestimate how much others will like us. With Psychologists sometimes, it seems they're thinking nobody will care about them… even when all their own work suggests that's not going to be the case!

It's that consistent pessimism we have, thinking we're small and insignificant. But that's a real shame, because then what you get is the people who are full of self-confidence, with the loudest voices, and they might not have the best opinions.

That reminds me of one of many interesting things you said in your talk for the BPS… that some of the worst writers to deal with are the ones with the biggest egos, because they've allowed that to get in the way of learning how to do it better. And it has certainly been my experience that while many Psychologists are reluctant to put themselves into their writing, some do it too much, so they never really make an attempt to move from that personal story to the more universal.

I do think that all good writing, not just in science, is about being able to toggle between a personal experience, and then the more universal. Those personal elements are a connective tissue.

You know, some writers say paragraphs themselves have very prescriptive structures – a thesis, antithesis, synthesis in each one. I think that's more for academic writing. For me, the important thing is that with each paragraph, you are crystal clear about what you want to say and how it is advancing the story. If I can't justify why that point is involved in the journey from the question I'm asking at the beginning to the answer at the end, I cut the paragraph. It becomes a propulsive force. 

Often, once you do have that narrative journey, and you're using those devices like scene setting, characters, plot and turning points, then the writing of becomes a lot simpler. It becomes clear how to structure the paragraphs and join them together, just by following the journey. Without that clear idea of where you are going at the end, it can become very meandering.

I know you tend to keep up with the latest findings in Psychology by trawling the journals… you must be quite 'old school' in doing that.

Well, sometimes ideas just come to you. Something might just be in the zeitgeist, perhaps people are talking about honesty a lot around The Traitors, and it makes sense for me to retroactively look for recent research that can tell us more about that. But there's a limit to what your creativity can do without having stimulation. That's where just reading lots of journal articles helps. I've got a huge document with anything that has captured my eye over the last 15 years or so, and it might only be a decade after I've first seen a topic that it suddenly crystallises and I think, 'now I can see a clear narrative I could write about that topic'. Maybe with the first paper I noted down, that would have been too early to give a good story.

How has the open research agenda and replication crisis side of things affected your work as a science writer?

It's very dispiriting sometimes… especially for book authors, there's a fear that what you write about won't stand the test of time. With a lot of these topics, it's still quite ambiguous. There are definitely researchers who fully believe in the growth mindset, for example, and there are some who think it has been debunked. For me, the answer is often more complicated than 'this idea is false', or 'this idea is always true'. It's often more about the context, how the research has been conducted. 

I do think Psychology was one of the first fields to deal with these replication issues, and we're now seeing the rewards. I love it when I open a new paper, and there are sometimes 20 different studies within the same paper, replications, 10,000 participants in total. You feel more confident reporting on that.

Actually, I don't think the replication crisis in Psychology has been worse than it has been in Medicine. There are loads of failed replications in medicine, but they're not getting the same coverage. 

Which brings me to the question, why Psychology for you? Your background was Maths.

I've always been interested in Psychology, I was always just slightly better at Maths than I was at Natural Sciences. It was a mistake, I guess, to allow that to sway my decision. But actually, my Maths degree was still relevant. I ended up specialising in statistics, so that's definitely helped me to understand the research results. But then, when I became a reporter and a writer, I naturally gravitated to psychology and neuroscience, because it was always the stuff that was most interesting. I've loved being able to stick in with it for long enough to see it grow, and to be revisiting those ideas I first noted down when I was an intern at New Scientist. 

It's interesting you say you picked Maths because you were slightly better at it… do you feel you are the best at what you do now?

Oh no! There are loads of people that I respect, and I'm always learning from other writers. Even when I'm editing, I might look at a piece and think 'I wouldn't have written it like this myself, but it works so well'. I want to try to work out why they made these decisions, in case I could use the same kind of tricks myself.

I think I have the advantage of specialising in one topic, whereas lots of science writers are generalists. I've built up that background knowledge in my beat for long enough now that knowing where a new paper sits within a general field doesn't take a lot of background research. I already know where to go to find the content. That's the only trick I have, really… making sure that I'm writing about what I already know, and then trying to build on that. It's quite rare now that I'll explore a topic I have never come across before.

Do you get feedback from Psychologists around whether they were happy with the treatment you gave their work?

It's almost always positive. My worry is just that people are too polite! But I try to stay very faithful to the research, I am really careful with fact-checking, and I try not to overstretch what research is telling us. So hopefully a lot of psychologists just see what I'm doing as a bridge so that their research can reach a wider audience. 

I do think people respond well to like science writers like myself communicating research, but people really like to hear from the experts themselves too. They definitely appreciate that. And I think they do have slightly different expectations of how that research is going to be communicated. I do think I have to work extra hard to engage the reader, whereas I think people are maybe willing to put in more work as a reader if they know they're hearing from the expert. 

That's interesting, because my thing for ages has been trying to build a community where psychologists are comfortable to come forward and share their work and themselves in their own voices. But often the feedback we get if someone like you writes a piece, is that it really stands out. 

I think people do appreciate having a mix. Sometimes they want to hear something that's reported, get the bird's eye view; sometimes they want to follow one person.

I think that's right. But I think there's perhaps also still this sense amongst a lot of scientists that it's OK for science writers to use the tools of narrative, but not for them.

I think it's important that these storytelling elements are not overused. They're pieces of scaffolding… sometimes they may be so subtle that readers are not necessarily even going to remember them. What they'll remember is the science and the concept, but these narrative tools helped pull them through the story. They are just useful and interesting ways of communicating what was going on, establishing a chain of events. 

For example, I wrote a piece around 'kama muta', 'the powerful emotion you didn't know you had'. It's your love for your football team, or your religion, or a newborn baby, any of these things, but there are certain characteristics that seem to be shared in all these situations that have led researchers to define it as an emotion in its own right. I asked one of those researchers, Alan Fiske, about the inspiration for this research. It turned out that during a working holiday in Norway with his two friends and collaborators, the psychologists Thomas Schubert and Beate Seibt, the conversation turned to children's films and superhero movies. Why, Schubert wondered, did he cry at their endings? They got talking about whether these happy tears, in a way, are representing emotion in their own right. I tried to describe this scene as part of the article's narrative, but it was only a couple of sentences, really… it's not like readers are going to get lost in that.

I think it's that when I talk about what we're looking for on The Psychologist, I tend to use the term 'persuasive', and maybe some academics conflate 'persuasion' with 'manipulation'. I don't think that necessarily has to be the case. You can try to leave a reader thinking and feeling and doing something differently in an honest way. I don't think it has to be pushing them down a path and ignoring other paths.

Definitely. You can also be very upfront in saying, 'this is my opinion, my interpretation, the research that I'm doing, here's my argument'. That is perfectly honest. I think persuasion would be a problem for me if you are deliberately cherry-picking, or you don't really believe what you're saying yourself but you're writing this piece for some ulterior motive. That's ethically dubious. But I think creating an argument isn't something that we should be worried about doing, especially if you know there's the opportunity for people who disagree to have their views heard as well. That is how debate happens, and how you ultimately move on from a difference of opinion.

• Find David Robson via his website and Substack. David is also a winner of the 2022 British Psychological Society Book Award for The Expectation Effect. You can find his contributions across our website.