Cameron Brick

Winners and losers: communicating the potential impacts of policies

Individual decision-makers need communications that succinctly describe potential harms and benefits of different options, but policymakers or citizens evaluating a policy are rarely given a balanced and easily understood summary of the potential outcomes of their decision. We review current policy option communication across diverse domains such as taxes, health, climate change, and international trade, followed by reviews of guidance and evidence for communication effectiveness. Our conceptual synthesis identifies four characteristics of policy options that make their communication particularly difficult: heterogeneous impacts on different segments of the population, multiple outcomes, long timescales, and large uncertainties. For communicators that are trying to inform rather than persuade, these complexities reveal a core tension between issue coverage and comprehensibility. We find little empirical evidence for how to communicate policy options effectively. We identify promising current communications, analyze them based on the above synthesis, and suggest priorities for future research. Recognizing the particular challenges of balanced, effective policy option communications could lead to better guidelines and support for policy decision-making.

Gender inequity in speaking opportunities at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting

Implicit and explicit biases impede the participation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) fields. Across career stages, attending conferences and presenting research are ways to spread scientific results, find job opportunities, and gain awards. Here, we present an analysis by gender of the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting speaking opportunities from 2014 to 2016. We find that women were invited and assigned oral presentations less often than men. However, when we control for career stage, we see similar rates between women and men and women sometimes outperform men. At the same time, women elect for poster presentations more than men. Male primary conveners allocate invited abstracts and oral presentations to women less often and below the proportion of women authors. These results highlight the need to provide equal opportunity to women in speaking roles at scientific conferences as part of the overall effort to advance women in STEM.Speaking at a scientific conference helps spread scientific results and is also fundamental for career advancement. Here the authors show that at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, the largest Earth and spacexa0science conference, women are offered speaking opportunities less often than menxa0overall.

When stereotype threat does not impair performance, self-affirmation can be harmful

Abstract When an individual is threatened by a negative stereotype, they are motivated to disconfirm the stereotype to protect self-integrity. When the task is simple and short, this motivation enables threatened individuals to counter the harmful effects of stereotype threat. Two theoretical accounts could explain this effect. First, performance is facilitated by a correct prepotent response according to the mere effort account. Second, the threatened individuals adopt a prevention focus that has a beneficial effect if the task demands few cognitive resources. The present article tested the hypothesis that protecting self-integrity via self-affirmation reduces the motivation to disconfirm the stereotype and could therefore harm performance. Across two experiments, threatened participants performed worse on simple and short math (Study 1) and mental rotations (Study 2) tests when self-affirmed compared to control. When stereotype threat leads to motivated engagement with a task, self-affirmation can reduce that motivation by boosting self-integrity.

49 The basis of evidence-informed policymaking: communicating the potential impacts of policies

Objectives We call for a new research area on the effective communication of policy options to support evidence-informed policy making. It is critical to communicate the evidence of potential impacts of different policy options in such a way that individuals can understand them, and then apply their own values and goals in their policy decisions. There has been much research done on how to convey numbers and evidence for individual decisions about, for example, health or finances. In recent decades, communications providing options for individuals have increasingly moved towards showing both potential harms and benefits of options, using principles of clear communication that have been tested empirically. We set out to review communications around policy options – whether by governments, businesses or NGOs – to see whether the same principles were being, or could be, applied. Method We carried out reviews of existing policy option communications from a wide range of domains and sources, of current guidelines for evidence summaries (such as governmental guidelines, and from organisations such as Cochrane), and of empirical studies of effectiveness of such communications in aiding comprehension. Results We identified very little empirical evidence on how policy options are best communicated. However, we did identify some key challenges that we believe makes policy-level communication more complex than individual-level communication: Policies usually have heterogeneous effects across a population which a decision–maker will need to bear in mind (there are winners and losers). The need to display these differential effects in such a way to allow comparison adds complexity Policy outcomes are often measured across many different domains (eg. health, environmental, financial), each with different metrics Policies often have effects over long time periods, and these effects may be variable. The evidence for potential policy impacts often has very large uncertainties around it Although all of these apply to individual-level communication too, we believe that policy-level communication suffers even more greatly, and there is a bigger trade-off to be made between making communications comprehensive and comprehensible. Conclusions In our review we identified examples of formats attempting to summarise policy-level evidence in an ‘at a glance’ summary. However, none of them appear to have been empirically tested on their target audiences. Equally, few organisational guidelines on how to present this kind of evidence cite any empirical research. We suggest that the field of policy-level communication is recognised as having a distinct set of challenges. We also suggest that empirical studies are called for in order to identify which lessons from individual-level communication research can be carried over, and how the specific challenges of policy-level communication are best met.