Belief systems, it turns out, can be like dams. However established, they can’t survive even the smallest crack: slowly, but inexorably, if somehow a small seed of doubt makes its way through, one drop becomes a trickle that becomes a jet and takes the whole thing down.
For Paul Martin Jensen, a health and science communications specialist, the first crack were snakes. “I love snakes. For whatever reason, snakes are my favorite animal,” he told STAT last week during the Breakthrough Summit East in New York City. “When I was really little it was one of the first words I learned how to write. I just really loved them as an animal, I thought they were fascinating.”
The church he belonged to as he grew up in Massachusetts, a global end-times Pentecostal movement of which his father was a minister, begged to differ. “One of the foundational stories of our faith was the Adam and Eve story, and the serpent is evil,” he said. But Jensen couldn’t help empathizing with the serpent: “it opened a crack of not necessarily believing everything that I was taught,” he said.
Through the years, that crack led him not just away from the beliefs of his church – notably, the idea of an imminent end of the world, and the rejection of any science that wouldn’t support the Christian scriptures – but to pursue a career in science communication and public health. “I’m probably one of a very small club of people who grew up learning conspiracy theories about the U.N. who then went on to go work for the U.N.,” he said.
“When I was maybe 5 years old, I would go to bed at night thinking about scenarios where I would be publicly executed by government agents,” he said. “These were all scenarios that were likely to unfold at the end of the world, which was imminent.” Instead he now runs a health research communications and training firm that routinely consults with public officials and international organizations including the United Nations, and looks at his upbringing as an asset when it comes to promoting science in the face of disinformation and misinformation.
Talking to STAT, Jensen shared some of the lessons he drew on his journey – and confirmed that his attachment to snakes has only deepened. “I have a pet python now,” he said.
What initially drew Jensen to science? Room for doubt
“I was always raised that science was true if it validated our doctrines, and if science undermined our doctrines, then it wasn’t true,” said Jensen. “The benchmark was always doctrine – so evolutionary theory, for instance, was a lie.” This showed him early on what his church was not good at addressing: doubt. “I always had questions, but there was never a space to really challenge the things that we learned,” he said.
In the face of dogma, science offered space for uncertainty. “Science was a place where saying ‘I don’t know’ was OK, and you could ask any question that you wanted,” Jensen said, “you could breathe in that kind of environment.” He finds that to be an underexploited point of strength for science, especially in the context of trying to persuade someone who holds unscientific beliefs. “I can’t say that science saved my life, but it certainly saved my mind,” he said.
“The thing that’s so amazing about science is the ability to say ‘we were wrong about that’,” said Jensen, who believes one of the tools for science communication is to “make it OK to be wrong.” He thinks leaning too much into the idea of scientists as ultimate authorities is an ineffective way to persuade people who disagree with you. “I think in many ways it is self-defeating when communicating in public because it doesn’t give anyone else any place to explore or ask the questions,” he said.
Some church strategies that can be applied to science communication
“The people I grew up with, they had a message – and they were going to spread that message,” said Jensen. “There was an imperative to share the message on an individual level and as a church.” Starting over 100 years ago, he said, the movement invested heavily in communication, quickly and effectively adopting innovative tools such as direct mail in the late 1800s, and then radio, television, satellite, and digital media.
One focus in particular was spreading the message to communities that hadn’t been touched yet. “They would direct resources to send people to the ends of the earth – the harder they were to reach geographically or philosophically the better,” he said. Today’s conspiracy theories are an example of how effective that is. “I grew up in earlier versions of [conspiracy theories] in the 1980s, when they were fringe, and now they’ve become mainstream,” he said, “because there has been all this work, this investment, and cultural drive to spread this way of thinking.”
The lesson, to him, is clear: “When you have something important to say, it must be shared and institutions need to invest – and what’s more important than science?” Yet science doesn’t place any premium on widely communicating its findings to the public, or perhaps even more importantly, its principles. The people doing the work, he said, aren’t trained to spread the message, and when they do, they don’t get rewarded or supported for it. “There was a massive gap in the capacity of many scientific leaders to communicate, not just the science, but to contextualize the science to actually show why it’s valuable,” he said.
“Communication is an enabler – [it] is how you advance the science, how you advance the mission, and that’s the way, that’s the shift that we need to see in how scientific organizations think about it,” he said.
Lessons for scientific communicators dealing with outlandish, conspiratorial, or misguided beliefs
“As a species, there are no limits to what human beings are capable of believing,” said Jensen about what breaking out of a cult-like organization showed him. But the reasons behind beliefs are complex and personal, he said, and it’s the job of science to suspend judgement and be empathetic. “You can’t ever understand someone else’s personal journey that led them to believe what they did. What we believe is the output of all the sum of all the inputs that we’ve ever experienced every day of our lives,” he said; understanding that provides “a certain amount of acceptance that allows you to then actually start to have a conversation.”
In his case, this often means asking more questions than telling people what they should believe, and trying to meet people where they are, mindful that the more outlandish a belief is, the more likely it is to be grafted to a person’s whole sense of identity. “Letting go of beliefs that are part of your group identity can mean losing your whole social support network,” he said.
But this, too, is something science can challenge in an effective way, by modeling what he calls “radical nonjudgement.” “Science is in a really good position to teach, to hold beliefs at an arm’s length and look at them as separate from ourselves and make belief something that we can pick up and examine and then put back down,” said Jensen. “That I think is a learned behavior that doesn’t necessarily come naturally to us.” A single conversation or interaction may not change beliefs, he said, but it may be the first crack that will end up, one day, bringing down the dam.
