At this moment there is quite a lot of media coverage on the 10% neuromyth because of the movie Lucy. But media don’t need a movie to talk about the brain, as neurology and neuroscience are quite a hype lately. A new study by van Atteveld et al. published on PLOSOne examined the dutch media on their coverage of neuroscience. They found that it depends on timing, topic and newspaper. Their is one conclusion very relevant specifically to education!
Some of their conclusions:
“From our results across all 1080 articles the newspaper coverage of neuroscience appears to be not very accurate, and not very critical. Across all articles, only 13% had a balanced tone. In other words, only about one 8th of the articles discussed both benefits as well as limitations of the research. A majority of 57% was neutral in tone, 13% had a skeptical tone, and 17% were optimistic.”
“On average, the newspaper articles we analyzed had low accuracy (0.27 on a scale from 0–1), which means they included only a very limited amount of research details such as specification and explanation of the used technique (but see below for a discussion of the limitations of the “accuracy” variable used in the current study). Like the limited critical view, the low accuracy is also consistent with previous research.”
“In sum, as predicted, our findings show that certain journalistic values are compromised during news waves. The increased optimism without increasing accuracy may indicate that positive information regarding neuroscience is not checked as well during news waves as during regular periods of reporting. The unchanged proportion of balanced articles shows that representing both sides of a story (or a research finding, in this case) is not compromised specifically during news waves, but is very low in general.”
“As predicted, neuroscience reporting in free and popular newspapers was less accurate compared to quality newspapers. In regards to tone, popular newspapers were more often neutral compared to quality papers, and free newspapers were more often optimistic compared to quality newspapers.”
And for education quite important to know:
“The results demonstrate that critical view and accuracy depend on the topic of the article. A notable observation is the high proportion of optimistic articles on brain development and learning, which was as predicted. This may be related to the susceptibility of the educational practice to misconceptions or “neuro-myths”.”
“Other notable observations were the low proportion of optimistic articles reporting on topics related to law and safety, and frequent skepticism in articles related to philosophical issues, law, politics and commercial use of neuroscience.”
Abstract of the research:
The rapid developments in neuroscientific techniques raise high expectations among the general public and therefore warrant close monitoring of the translation to the media and daily-life applications. The need of empirical research into neuroscience communication is emphasized by its susceptibility to evoke misconceptions and polarized beliefs. As the mass media are the main sources of information about (neuro-)science for a majority of the general public, the objective of the current research is to quantify how critically and accurately newspapers report on neuroscience as a function of the timing of publication (within or outside of periods of heightened media attention to neuroscience, termed “news waves”), the topic of the research (e.g. development, health, law) and the newspaper type (quality, popular, free newspapers). The results show that articles published during neuroscience news waves were less neutral and more optimistic, but not different in accuracy. Furthermore, the overall tone and accuracy of articles depended on the topic; for example, articles on development often had an optimistic tone whereas articles on law were often skeptical or balanced, and articles on health care had highest accuracy. Average accuracy was rather low, but articles in quality newspapers were relatively more accurate than in popular and free newspapers. Our results provide specific recommendations for researchers and science communicators, to improve the translation of neuroscience findings through the media: 1) Caution is warranted during periods of heightened attention (news waves), as reporting tends to be more optimistic; 2) Caution is also warranted not to follow topic-related biases in optimism (e.g., development) or skepticism (e.g., law); 3) Researchers should keep in mind that overall accuracy of reporting is low, and especially articles in popular and free newspapers provide a minimal amount of details. This indicates that researchers themselves may need to be more active in preventing misconceptions to arise.