The Conversation - The public isn’t bored with economists, management scholars and sociologists but engaging people has conditions

For years, we’ve been told a familiar story: social scientists such as economists, management scholars, sociologists, talk and the public shrugs. The claim goes that people don’t find our work interesting, that our expertise is fuzzy compared with “hard” sciences, and that journalists and readers will always prefer the crisp authority of practitioners such as CEOs, consultants or politicians… Is that really true?

We put it to a real-world test in a large survey and found the opposite, with a twist: audiences do want to hear from economists, management scholars and sociologists, but they reward social scientists when we stay in our lane, and they pull back when we stray or act as quasi-practitioners.

In short: the public is listening, but it listens for fit.

Communication barriers around expertise, trust and a crowded stage

In public debate and in our research we reviewed three recurring “headwinds” that social scientists experience when trying to reach people through the media.

1) A perceived expertise gap: because questions related to social issues overlap with everyday experience and can feel like “common sense”, audiences may rate social sciences as less “scientific” than physics, biology or medicine. That proximity helps relevance, but it can also hide the value of specialised methods unless we make them explicit.

2) A trustworthiness barrier: In a polarised, “post-truth” environment, social science scholars are at times suspected of partisanship; reproducibility debates can also loom larger here than in many Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

These are perceptions that circulate in the public arena, not judgements we endorse, yet they can raise the bar for social sciences scholars seeking legitimacy with broad audiences.

3) The channel problem: competition from practitioners. Media spaces are porous for social issues, and business leaders, consultants and politicians have frequent, sometimes privileged access to newsrooms. In that crowded arena, it is easy to assume that, for example, a CEO who “lives it every day” will sound more credible than a management scholar. This is why it is often predicted that practitioners will dominate attention and trust.