“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