Matthew Nisbet and Dietram Scheufele, experts on issues related to science and the media, have a new paper in the American Journal of Botany. They argue that researchers need “a more scientific approach to science communication, i.e., one that is less exclusively driven by intuition, personal experience, or traditional ways of  ‘doing communication,’ and more by an empirical understanding of how modern societies make sense of and participate in debates over science and emerging technologies.”
As they point out, scientific illiteracy is only a small part of the problem, and “far stronger influences on opinion derive from value dispositions such as ideology, partisanship, and religious identity.”