Scientists Who Selfie Results Published!

 

Female scientists portraits or "selfies" prompted the greatest perceptions of both warmth and trustworthiness in our study.

Today, our Scientists Who Selfie experiment results were published in PLOS ONE!

Need a refresher of what our project was all about? Want a summary of what we found? Read on!

Many scientists today have embraced social media as tools to communicate their research and to engage broader audiences in scientific discovery and its outcomes. But the rise of the “social media scientist” has also led communicators and scholars to ask an important and often overlooked question: Do people trust the scientists who show up in their social media feeds?

The answer may depend on how these scientists portray themselves. In our new paper titled “Using selfies to challenge public stereotypes of scientists,” published today in PLOS ONE, we conclude that scientists who post “selfies” or self-portraits in their Instagram feeds foster trust and help change public stereotypes that scientists are competent but not warm. Posting science images without a human element, at least based on our findings, don't significantly increase viewers' perceptions of scientists as warm and trustworthy (compared to control images of non-scientists).

Our study built on seminal work by Princeton University social psychologist Susan Fiske suggesting that scientists have earned Americans’ respect but not their trust. Trust depends on two perceived characteristics of an individual or social group: competence and warmth. Perceptions of competence involve the belief that members of a particular social group are intelligent and have the skills to achieve their goals. Perceptions of warmth involve the belief that the members of this group also have benevolent goals, or that they are friendly, altruistic, honest and share common values with people outside of their group. Together, perceptions of competence and warmth determine all group stereotypes, including stereotypes of scientists.

“Scientists are famously competent—people report we’re smart, curious, lab nerds—but they’re silent about scientists’ more human qualities,” - Susan Fiske.

While our perceptions of both the competence and the warmth of members of a social group are important, it turns out that perceived warmth is more important. And, as Susan Fiske has shown in a study published in 2014 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Americans see scientists as competent but only as moderately warm. Scientists’ perceived warmth is on par with that of retail workers, bus drivers and construction workers but far below that of doctors, nurses and teachers.

We launched our own investigation into perceptions of scientist Instagrammers after being struck with the idea that the competence versus warmth stereotype of scientists may not be an insurmountable challenge given the power of social media to bring scientists and nonscientists together.

We wondered whether Instagram posts depicting the faces of friendly, honest scientists sharing glimpses of their everyday work in the science lab or field could help change the problematic stereotypes that scientists are competent but not warm.

"Instagram is also a place where people with different backgrounds and interests can come together and even get to know each other via common hashtags. K-12 teachers are using social media in the classroom to introduce young students to scientists online. This multimedia-rich interaction could help broader audiences get to know the friendly, sociable, fun and relatable scientist.” - study co-author Becky Carmichael, LSU Communication across the Curriculum science coordinator

To explore this idea, we launched a research project popularly known as ScientistsWhoSelfie, based on the hashtag we introduced to raise awareness about their this Experiment.com project (and which we were amazed and humbled by your engagement with!).

 

Scientists Who Selfie methods

A few dozen scientists around the globe helped us to develop a series of images for our project. The idea was to show research participants images published to one of four different “Scientists of Instagram” rotation-curation accounts and then to ask them questions about their perceptions of the scientists represented in these images as well as of scientists in general. Each participant was shown three types of images: a scientific setting or a piece of equipment such as a microscope, a bioreactor on the lab bench or a plant experiment set-up in a greenhouse with no humans in any of the images but with captions attributing the images to either male or female scientists by name; a smiling male scientist looking at the camera in the same scientific setting; or a smiling female scientist looking at the camera in the same scientific setting.

A total of 1,620 U.S.-representative participants recruited online viewed these images in an online survey. People who saw images including a scientist’s smiling face - or scientist “selfies” - evaluated the scientists they saw and scientists in general as significantly warmer than did people who saw control images or images of scientific environments or equipment that did not contain a human element. This perception of scientists as warm was especially prominent among people who saw images featuring a female scientist’s face, as female scientists in selfies were evaluated as significantly warmer than male scientists in selfies or scientists who had taken science-only images. There was also a slight increase in the perceived competence of female scientists in selfies. Competence cues such as lab coats and equipment likely played a role in preserving the perceived competence of scientists in selfies.

 

Scientists Who Selfie Findings.

Seeing scientist selfies, but not images of scientific objects posted by scientists online, boosted perceptions that scientists are both competent and warm. We think this is because people who viewed science images with a scientist’s face in the picture began to see these scientist communicators on Instagram not as belonging to some unfamiliar group of stereotypically socially inept geniuses, but as individuals and even as ‘everyday’ people with ‘normal’ interests - people who, like us, enjoy taking selfies! Female scientists in particular, when represented in substantial numbers and diversity, may cause viewers to re-evaluate stereotypical perceptions of who a scientist is.

We also found that seeing a series of female scientist selfies on Instagram significantly shifted gender-related science stereotypes, namely those that associate STEM fields with being male. However, we also found that people who saw female scientist selfies evaluated these scientists as significantly more attractive than male scientist selfies. This might help explain female scientists’ boosted warmth evaluations, as physical attractiveness is positively associated with perceived warmth. However, this could also be an indicator that viewers focused more on the physical appearance of female scientists than on male scientists. By extension, female scientists could be more unfairly evaluated for defying gender norms in their selfies, such as not smiling or appearing warm. In their PLOS ONE paper, the team writes that this possibility should be investigated further in future research. While selfies offer a new medium for humanizing scientists and challenging gender stereotypes about scientists, Instagram is not free from the stereotypes that women still face both online and offline.

Future studies should explore how different types of selfies by scientists are evaluated by broader audiences and how scientists can best build relationships with these audiences. But we believe that overall, scientists who use social media to humanize themselves are helping to foster transparency of science, public trust and interest in science.

“This is only the start of empirically understanding how we can use new digital tools for connecting with broader audiences. These data are encouraging that individuals on Instagram can impact generalized beliefs about scientists, though they do call for those of us online to acknowledge the responsibility we have as representatives of the scientific community. However, the real power of communicating science through social media is that there are no limits to who can do it or how, and so these results shouldn’t be taken as prescriptive to limit anyone from sharing authentically online.” - study author Samantha Yammine

Previous empirical studies have shown that social media has a direct influence on the development of gender stereotypes. In the US and Canada alone, more than 50% of people between the ages of 13 and 29 use Instagram. By including selfies in science communication efforts, scientists may be able to influence the formation of traditional gender stereotypes in younger audiences, including the association of science with masculinity. While by no means a necessary part of science communication, we believe these practices can inspire future generations of scientists AND provide interesting educational content.

“The results of this research help us understand how to close the gap between scientists and the public and make scientists better communicators. As a scientist on social media, I’ve personally struggled with how to balance my research and personal life in posts, always wondering, am I posting too much science that might alienate people or too many selfies that might distract from my science? It’s encouraging to know that sharing my science with a smile on my face might help foster trust, inform voters or inspire the next wave of scientists!” - Dr. Bryan Lessard, an entomologist at CSIRO’s Aus­tralian National Insect Col­lec­tion

Read the full study!

 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216625

Summary authored by all study co-authors