THE ROLE OF METAPHORS IN PUBLIC COMPREHENSION AND RETENTION OF SCIENCE

Popular media is one of the main conduits passing information from the scientific community to the general public. Unfortunately, a media focused on sales and, thus, hyperbole (with a preponderance of stories involving words ending in “-est” – slowest, fastest, biggest etc.) or “hooks” (stories often fall in the three categories of “wacky, scare tactics, and breakthrough”) frequently fails to portray science in such a way that it is completely accurate, convincing, compelling, or retained by readers/viewers. There is, consequently, a gap between science, what scientists think is important, and the general public and what they are conversant in scientifically. Given the importance of science to our current and future technologies and, thence, society, this gap is both troubling and problematic. By extending familiar relationships and experiences to unfamiliar concepts, metaphors are a particularly important link between the often abstract or theoretical reality of science and reader comprehension, and, thus, may provide a crucial bridge of the gap between science and the lay public. Here we test the idea that the metaphors most likely to promote retention and comprehension of presented material involve probable life experiences of the intended audience. We present written scientific information to two populations of undergraduate students. One group of students received a scientific press release where the metaphors were all carefully tailored to the life of an undergraduate student (e.g. the experience of studying for exams); the other group received a scientific press release where all of the metaphors were entirely abstract (e.g. travel to and from the sun) and, thus, unlikely to have been experienced by the audience. Following their reading of the scientific press release, all students were presented with twenty minutes of mainstream, non-science, media and then given a quiz to test both their retention and comprehension of the earlier presented scientific material.