The psychology behind The Psychologist

In July 2009 my professional life underwent a dramatic change when my research became the focus of the world's media. My research paper, 'Swearing as a response to pain', freshly published in the peer-review journal Neuroreport, somehow captured attention on a grand scale. The One Show on the BBC sent a crew to my base, Keele University, re-enacting the study on campus, asking passers-by to dip a hand in a jug of ice-cold water and let rip with some profanity. I learned of a similar shoot in New York's Central Park. At one point I was in my kitchen asking a reporter from The Times on my mobile if they would mind waiting while I spoke to the New York Times on the landline.

It was a baptism of fire and I had quickly to work out how to describe my research in a way that non-psychologists would understand. In short, though I did not realise at the time, I was abruptly thrust into the world of science communication.

This is a field where scientists, journalists, authors, artists and many other professions besides, join forces with the aim of sharing scientific stories to as wide and diverse an audience as possible. Now, as Chair of the Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee for the British Psychological Society, I have an increasing interest in how we do it – in short, the psychology behind The Psychologist.

Don't be such a scientist?

Initially I was most concerned with giving a fair account of my research – wanting to demonstrate I had followed the 'rules of science' to provide new yet reliable evidence-based knowledge. It was only later I started to question the purpose of sharing scientific research to a wide audience. The science communication literature suggests encouraging members of the public to engage with science might impact positively on society, increasing general understandings of the nature of scientific inquiry, as well as support for science as means of addressing societal problems (Kappel & Holmen, 2019).

In the years that followed I honed my science communication skills, following sensible advice like avoiding jargon, using plain English, writing in the active rather than the passive voice, and generally reducing the technical demands placed on the reader. I was particularly taken with oceanographer Randy Olsen's book brimming with advice for scientists turned communicators, 'Don't be such a scientist'. Olsen's passion for communicating the wonders of ocean life, and threats to its sustainability, saw him give up a tenure-track academic career to retrain as a film student.

Entertainingly, the book encourages scientists to go beyond fact-based arguments – which he says don't work – instead advising writers to reach their audience on an emotional level using storytelling techniques. One of these is the 'three act structure' which follows the formula of setting a context (act 1), introducing drama with an uncertain outcome (act 2), before following through to a resolution (act 3). Another is the 'arouse and fulfil' technique, whereby you start by capturing the reader's attention and end by demonstrating its relevance to their own life.

I have noticed that simplified written accounts of research aimed at wider audiences are becoming increasingly common. Plain language summaries often accompany peer review journal articles. In this context such summaries have been described as a logical next step in the Open Science movement, addressing the problem that open access science papers would otherwise remain inaccessible to lay audiences because they are written in dense, technical language. The Cochrane health information charity publishes them online to enable members of the public to access health research. In the social sciences, where studies depend on people volunteering as participants, there is an ethical demand to provide simplified accounts sharing findings with participants in appropriate formats. There also exist many blogging and social media sites that aim to share the findings of research for the benefits of lay audiences, not least our own Research Digest (which marked its 20th anniversary this year). Finally, simplified accounts of individual studies are often reported in mainstream media news cycles, as I learned first-hand back in 2009.

But there's something missing. I was several years into my science communicator career, starting to teach it to psychology undergraduates, when I noticed. Where was the evidence that presenting science for a lay audience makes a difference to people's understanding and support for science? Moreover, what psychological processes account for how such changes come about? These questions have recently begun attracting research attention.

Simple vs complex

Several studies have compared user experiences of reading simplified versions of scientific texts with more complex versions. Martin Kerwer and a team from Trier in Germany had 166 university students read a simplified summary of a piece of psychological research compared with the abstract of a peer-review psychology research article. All materials were based on psychology research from the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. They found that participant ratings of comprehensibility, credibility, ability to evaluate the study and ability to make an informed decision about the research subject showed higher scores for the simplified summaries over the study abstracts. Participants also reported reductions in negative emotions, boredom, frustration and confusion for the summaries.

Kerwer's team explained these effects via what they called the 'easiness' effect, defined as the tendency for readers to agree more with a piece of scientific text the more comprehensible that it is. They suggested that easy-to-read texts generate feelings of familiarity and positive emotion, with these positive emotional feelings presenting a heuristic basis for trusting the content. However, this was not tested (Kerwer et al., 2021).

Similarly, Benjamin Freeling and colleagues from the Universities of Adelaide and South Australia carried out an experiment comparing versions of study abstracts re-drafted to be of higher or lower readability. The topics were social anxiety, solar cells and populist politics. The researchers improved readability by writing in the first person (e.g. 'we carried out a study'), avoiding complex punctuation like colons and semi-colons, avoiding acronyms (e.g. BPS), avoiding consecutive nouns (e.g. 'research ethics committee') and reducing word counts. In their sample of 170 undergraduate students, easier pieces were rated as more readable, as inspiring more confidence and promoting more understanding. These authors did not attempt to theorise as to the underlying psychology (Freeling et al., 2021).

Olivia Bullock and colleagues at Ohio State University carried out an experiment based on short written pieces about the emerging technologies self-driving cars, surgical robots and bioprinting. Versions were prepared including or excluding jargon, e.g. replacing 'cloud-connected' with 'linked via the internet using wireless technology'. Across 650 participants drawn from the US general population, removing jargon reduced how risky the emergent technologies were perceived to be, and increased participant support for the technologies. In examining the underlying psychological processes, they found removing jargon increased processing fluency, in other words the speed and ease with which the pieces were read and understood. This in turn reduced participants' questioning of the technology on safety or other grounds. Finally, reduced questioning was linked directly to the lower risk and increased support ratings for the technologies (Bullock et al., 2019).

A further published paper based on the same dataset found increasing processing fluency led to participants identifying more with science and technology. In the no-jargon condition participants rated themselves as being more pro-science and pro-technology. This in turn lead to higher levels of engagement with the topic (Shulman et al., 2020). The same team went on to show that easier-to-read pieces increased awareness of adverse health effects linked to sunburn (Bullock & Schulman, 2021).

These experiments provide evidence that simplified science writing is both more persuasive and informative. This has been explained in terms of ease of processing (processing fluency) leading to positive emotion, less questioning of the content, or increased social identification with the content. Some of these ideas echo previous work in the wider field of the psychology of communication based on storytelling and narrative.

Narrative transport, and flow

Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, also from Ohio State University, were writing about narrative in the early 2000s. They began with the presumption that narrative is the preferred organizing and retrieving mental structure for human thought. They defined a narrative as a description of a series of events in which a character encounters and then resolves a crisis. These events occur within a structure that has an identifiable beginning, middle and end. Their 'narrative transportation theory' of attitude change posits that immersion within the narrative world reduces our capacity for critical scrutiny of the messages contained within the narrative, and our capacity to develop counterarguments (Green & Brock, 2000). There is strong support for this theory from several meta-analyses (e.g. Van Laer et al., 2014).

The similarity with the processing fluency-reduced questioning theory put forward by Olivia Bullock is notable. However, we have yet to see research comparing narrative transport theory with other theories in the context of science communication. One problem in applying narrative transportation theory to blogging about research is that research blogs usually contain minimal levels of characterisation, whereas story characters play a central role in the articulation of the narrative transport theory. Still, commentators acknowledge other elements of stories in scientific studies besides characterisation, including a problem to be solved (drama), the temporal sequence of how a study is conducted (plot), and the production of evidence that helps to answer the question (resolution).

Psychological flow theory may also be relevant to explaining science communication, although there has been little research to date assessing flow in this context. Originally described by the positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a pleasurable psychological state associated with an ongoing task. Flow is likely to occur when there is a good match between the challenge presented by the task and the person's ability to meet the challenge, such that the task is perceived as neither too easy nor too difficult. When in flow, a person ceases to pay attention to matters beyond the task at hand, including physical surroundings, unrelated thoughts and the passage of time (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Flow theory appears highly applicable if one frames the science communicator task as one of simplifying complex scientific information making it suitable for a non-specialist audience. I should add that I understand flow to be on a continuum from lower to higher levels, rather than a threshold from absent to present.

Recent research from my lab had 128 participants read either a shortened version of a psychological science blog adapted from the British Psychological Society Research Digest or a peer review scholarly article abstract describing the same research. Readers of the blog format showed higher levels of flow, engagement and enjoyment. Moreover, changes in engagement and enjoyment were shown to be linked to changes in flow (Stephens, 2023). Further research assessing flow experiences in the context of science blogging could help better explain how they achieve their aims as well as provide a framework for developing practical advice for authors.

Getting our voice heard

I'm pleased that psychology research has begun to provide evidence that presenting science for a lay audience can and does make a difference to readers' understanding and acceptance of science. True, studies to date have been relatively few and have employed only short timescales between exposure and testing. We don't know how long changes in attitudes persist nor what happens with repeated exposure to science blogs. It's also true that our theoretical understanding of the psychology underlying reader experiences of science blogging is at a fledgling stage with further work to be done to understand how the different explanations, emotional, reduced resistance, social identity, narrative transportation and/ or flow, relate to one another. Improving our understanding of the psychology behind science communication – if you will, the psychology behind The Psychologist – is a worthwhile pursuit considering the societal benefits that would accrue from increasing public support for scientific approaches to solving problems. This applies doubly for our own discipline of Psychology, which has a huge amount to offer society, provided its voice gets heard.

- Dr Richard Stephens was the recipient of the 2014 Wellcome Trust & Guardian Science Writing Prize. Richard's popular science book, Black Sheep The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad, won the 2017 British Psychological Society Book Award. Richard chairs the British Psychological Society Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee.

Editor's comment: If you've been following The Psychologist over the years, you'll know I have quite the interest in science communication in general, and the idea of 'storytelling' specifically. We've been working with Richard and the Advisory Committee more broadly on some small-scale web surveys of how readers engage with and respond to our content. Some stand-out results so far include that 84 per cent report finding what they've just read informative, 83 per cent engaging, and 82 per cent enjoyable; more than half say it was pitched at about the right level; more than half of respondents say what they have read will change how they understand themselves or the world; and 19 per cent of respondents say they will trust psychological science more after what they have read. It's important we build on this preliminary work, as we know our website continues to reach out to an audience much larger and wider than the British Psychological Society membership.

Another key point for me is how diverse science communication can be, as Richard notes. We're considering a special issue which truly showcases this, having carried poetry, short stories, photo formats / competitions, 'psychology love letters' and so much more. That's fundamental to our existence as a magazine.

In unapologetically being a magazine, I've always emphasised the personal, alongside the practical and the persuasive. I think that will continue to be woven through all we do as The Psychologist – fundamentally a magazine about psychology and psychologists. But I do think there's also scope for a bit of a renewed focus on more traditionally academic interests such as rigour and replicability; to that end, I was delighted to welcome Marcus Munafo on board as Associate Editor for Research, and we'll be hearing from him in the months to come.

As ever, I'm available to discuss any of this, on [email protected].

Key sources

Bullock, O.M. & Shulman, H.C. (2021). Utilizing Framing Theory to Design More Effective Health Messages about Tanning Behavior among College Women. Communication Studies, 72:3, 319-332,

Bullock, O. M., Colón Amill, D., Shulman, H. C., & Dixon, G. N. (2019). Jargon as a barrier to effective science communication: Evidence from metacognition. Public Understanding of Science, 28(7), 845-853.

Csikszentmihalyi M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Freeling, B.S., Doubleday, Z.A., Dry, M.J., Semmler, C. & Connell, S.D. (2021). Better writing in scientific publications builds reader confidence and understanding. Front. Psychol. 12:714321.

Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721.

Kappel. K. & Holmen, S.J. (2019). Why science communication, and does it work? A taxonomy of science communication aims and a survey of the empirical evidence. Frontiers in Communication, 4, 55.

Kerwer, M., Chasiotis, A., Stricker, J., Günther, A., Rosman, T. (2021). Straight from the scientist's mouth – Plain language summaries promote laypeople's comprehension and knowledge acquisition when reading about individual research findings in Psychology. Collabra: Psychology 7(1): 18898.

Olson, R. (2011). Don't be such a scientist: talking substance in an age of style. Washington, DC : Island Press.

Shulman, H. C., Dixon, G. N., Bullock, O. M., & Colón Amill, D. (2020). The effects of jargon on processing fluency, self-perceptions, and scientific engagement. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 39(5-6), 579–597.

Stephens, R. (2023). Evidencing the efficacy of science blogging as a tool for science communication.

Van Laer, T., de Ruyter, K., Visconti, L.M. & Wetzels, M. (2014). The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Narrative Transportation. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(5), 797–817.