“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