“Our desire for truthfulness makes us suspicious of institutions”

You have pre­vi­ously spoken a lot about the import­ance of good sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. Was it a missed opportunity? 

Etienne Klein. In a way, yes. Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, we heard many sci­ent­ists talk, but we heard very little from “sci­ence”. We missed a his­tor­ic oppor­tun­ity to edu­cate the pub­lic about sci­ence. On a daily basis, we could have shown how research­ers work, the biases they fight against, their pro­to­cols, their mis­takes, their suc­cesses. We could also have taken the time to explain cer­tain import­ant con­cepts like what a “double-blind tri­al” is, stat­ist­ic­al ana­lys­is, expo­nen­tial func­tions or how to dis­tin­guish between cor­rel­a­tion and caus­al­ity? Unfor­tu­nately, instead of doing this, we pre­ferred to stage con­tro­ver­sial debate between pub­lic figures. 

For many months, the dis­tinc­tion between sci­ence and research were con­fused; they are two dif­fer­ent things, even if they are not mutu­ally exclus­ive. A sci­ent­ist is someone who can say: “we know that” and “we won­der if”. The first half of this sen­tence refers to sci­ence, the second to research. Sci­ence rep­res­ents a body of know­ledge that has been duly tested and that there is no reas­on – until fur­ther notice! – to ques­tion: the Earth is round not flat, the atom exists, the observ­able uni­verse is expand­ing, etc. But this know­ledge, by its very incom­plete­ness, raises ques­tions about things that are not yet known to sci­ent­ists (or to any­one else). 

Answer­ing such ques­tions is the goal of research. By its very nature, there­fore, research involves doubt, where­as sci­ence is made up of a set of givens that are dif­fi­cult to ques­tion without extremely sol­id argu­ments. But when this dis­tinc­tion is not made, the image of the sci­ences, mis­takenly con­fused with research, becomes blurred and degraded: they give the impres­sion of a per­man­ent battle between experts who can nev­er agree, which just isn’t the case. From the out­side, it is obvi­ously a bit dif­fi­cult to follow… 

Is there cur­rently much mis­trust in sci­ence by the public? 

The pan­dem­ic revealed some­thing that already exis­ted: the sys­tem­at­ic sus­pi­cion of insti­tu­tion­al dis­course. The philo­soph­er Bern­ard Wil­li­ams observed two cur­rents of thought in post­mod­ern soci­et­ies such as ours that are both con­tra­dict­ory and asso­ci­ated. On the one hand, there is an intense attach­ment to truth­ful­ness: we have a desire to avoid being deceived giv­ing us the determ­in­a­tion to break through appear­ances in the search of pos­sible ulteri­or motives hid­den behind insti­tu­tion­al mes­saging. And, along­side this per­fectly legit­im­ate refus­al to be fooled, there is an equally great dis­trust of truth itself: does it really exist? If so, how could it be oth­er than rel­at­ive, sub­ject­ive, tem­por­ary, loc­al, instru­ment­al­ised, cul­tur­al, cor­por­at­ist, con­tex­tu­al, fake? 

Curi­ously, these two oppos­ite atti­tudes, which should in all logic be mutu­ally exclus­ive, turn out in prac­tice to be quite com­pat­ible. They are even mech­an­ic­ally linked: the desire for truth­ful­ness sets off a gen­er­al­ised crit­ic­al pro­cess with­in soci­ety, which makes people doubt that there can be, if not access­ible truths, at least proven untruths. All this weak­ens the cred­it giv­en to the word of sci­ent­ists and to any form of insti­tu­tion­al expression. 

Allow me a per­son­al anec­dote. When I explain fun­da­ment­al phys­ics phe­nom­ena such as the Higgs boson, no one sus­pects that my belong­ing to the CEA (French Centre for Atom­ic Energy) could influ­ence my com­mu­nic­a­tion. But if I talk about radio­activ­ity, then people often think that I am much more influ­enced by an insti­tu­tion­al bias to CEA… 

But how do you mark the dif­fer­ence between what you know and what you don’t know? 

The bound­ary between the two evolves over time. We have also seen the typ­ic­al dynam­ics of the so-called “Dun­ning-Kruger” effect unfold. This is a cog­nit­ive bias that has been iden­ti­fied for a long time and was stud­ied empir­ic­ally in 1999 by two Amer­ic­an psy­cho­lo­gists, Dav­id Dun­ning and Justin Kruger. The effect is based on a double para­dox: on the one hand, to meas­ure one’s incom­pet­ence, one must be… com­pet­ent. On the oth­er hand, ignor­ance makes people more con­fid­ent about their know­ledge. Indeed, it is only by dig­ging into a ques­tion, by inform­ing one­self, by invest­ig­at­ing it, that we dis­cov­er it to be more com­plex than we suspected. 

At that point, a per­son then loses his/her self-con­fid­ence, only to regain it little by little as they become genu­inely com­pet­ent in that thing – but now tread­ing with cau­tion about what they know. Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, we saw the dif­fer­ent phases of this effect unfold in real time: as we became more informed, as we invest­ig­ated, we came to under­stand that the mat­ter was more com­plex than we had sus­pec­ted. Today, (almost) every­one, it seems to me, has under­stood that this pan­dem­ic is a dev­il­ishly com­plic­ated affair. As a res­ult, arrog­ance is a little less wide­spread than it was a few months ago.

Is social media the culprit?

In part, because social media offers a way for each of us to choose our inform­a­tion and, with it, ulti­mately our “truths”. Digit­al tech­no­logy even allows the advent of a new con­di­tion of the con­tem­por­ary indi­vidu­al: as soon as we are con­nec­ted, we can shape our own access to the world via our smart­phone and, in return, be shaped by the con­tent we receive per­sist­ently from social networks. 

Thus, each of us builds a kind of cus­tom­ised world, an “ideo­lo­gic­al home”, by choos­ing the digit­al com­munit­ies that best suit us. This cre­ates what Toc­queville would have called “small soci­et­ies”, with very homo­gen­eous con­vic­tions and thoughts, each defend­ing its own cause. In this world, we can go about life almost nev­er being con­fron­ted with con­tra­dic­tion, since we only ever encounter con­firm­a­tion biases… Thus, we become quick to declare the ideas we like as true to be the truth!

Do you think then that media should stop put­ting out “sci­entif­ic debates”, to avoid wrong inter­pret­a­tion of the facts? 

I have always defen­ded the idea that sci­ent­ists should express them­selves pub­licly because I have always thought that there is a link between repub­lic and know­ledge: in a repub­lic worthy of its name, know­ledge, espe­cially sci­entif­ic know­ledge, must be able to cir­cu­late without hindrance. The ques­tion that I would ask is rather this: “Is the way that the media, as is cur­rently struc­tured, adap­ted to the dif­fu­sion of sci­entif­ic know­ledge?” So-called ‘debates’ about sci­entif­ic top­ics do not seem to be good tools to share sci­entif­ic ideas. Per­haps we need to invent new forms of con­fer­ences, which give the time required to argue a point, to explain how we have come to know what we know. But this requires an amount of time that the media won’t or can’t allocate…

When I was young­er, I thought that as soon as we had explained some­thing clearly, the job was done. But no! Because there are so many cog­nit­ive biases at play, which mod­u­late and dis­tort the mes­sages that are being sent out. So, it’s very com­plic­ated. I star­ted com­mu­nic­at­ing sci­ence almost thirty years ago, and at the time I had no idea how vast the task would be! 

We must find a way to give cred­it back to the sci­entif­ic con­tent (you will notice that I prefer to speak of cred­it rather than trust). This will undoubtedly require a return to the use of the we rather than I: when it comes to trans­mit­ting know­ledge, I prefer that a research­er speaks in the name of the com­munity to which he belongs rather than in a per­son­al capa­city. Because sci­ence is indeed a col­lect­ive endeav­our. And the sci­entif­ic com­munity will then have to work to invent new ways of trans­mit­ting knowledge. 

Interview by James Bowers