Department of Emerging Media, University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota, United States of America.
Department of Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2024 Oct 4;19(10):e0306563. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0306563. eCollection 2024.
Experts have called for public engagement with the governance of controversial scientific research and discoveries, including CRISPR, the technology that enables gene editing. Though engaging and informing citizens who are not interested in the issue is a challenge, recent studies suggest humor has potential to close interest and knowledge gaps. We tested this potential by exposing individuals (N = 303) to one of three videos (an edited clip from Last Week Tonight, an edited clip from 60 Minutes, or control) that contained broadly overlapping facts about gene editing in an online survey. Results show that while exposure to the Last Week Tonight clip did not increase attentiveness to the issue of human gene editing among individuals with lower levels of interest in science, exposure to the humorous clip caused a modest improvement in issue knowledge. Positive main effects on perceived knowledge were found for both treatments. More research is needed but findings suggest that the use of humor in science communication offers potential, though perhaps limited, for broadening public engagement with emerging areas of science.
专家呼吁公众参与有争议的科学研究和发现的治理，包括 CRISPR 技术，该技术可实现基因编辑。尽管让对该问题不感兴趣的公民参与并告知他们是一个挑战，但最近的研究表明，幽默有可能缩小兴趣和知识差距。我们通过在在线调查中向个人（N=303）暴露于三个视频中的一个（来自《上周今夜秀》的编辑片段、来自《60 分钟》的编辑片段或对照）来测试这种潜力，该视频包含关于基因编辑的广泛重叠的事实。结果表明，尽管接触《上周今夜秀》的剪辑并没有增加对科学兴趣较低的个体对人类基因编辑问题的关注，但接触幽默的剪辑确实适度提高了对该问题的了解。两种处理方法都对感知知识产生了积极的主要影响。需要进行更多的研究，但研究结果表明，幽默在科学传播中的使用为扩大公众对新兴科学领域的参与提供了潜力，尽管可能有限。
