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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 19 2015, @10:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the cartoon-chemistry-always-goes-boom dept.

Scientific American has a piece on how the public and chemists perceive and mis-perceive attitudes about chemistry:

What my colleagues and I have found is that public perception of chemistry, chemists and chemicals is far more positive than we believed. Like other sciences, people think the benefits chemistry brings to society outweigh the risks. The problem, as described in a report published by the U.K.'s Royal Society of Chemistry, is that many people are confused about what chemists are and what they do. Additionally, people tend to be neutral about chemistry and don't see how it's personally relevant. They have limited "encounters" with chemistry and low awareness about its applications and the role it plays in various industries and sciences. But they are not "anti-chemistry".
...
When we looked into chemists' attitudes towards the public we found that our community tends to paint a very negative picture compared to the reality of public opinion. Many are particularly worried that chemicals have a bad reputation and we found that chemophobia is often mentioned as the cause and/or the effect of this reputation. This is now a well-established narrative in many discussions, but one that our community developed without real evidence.
...
Understanding this, I have to agree with University of Hull senior lecturer and science writer Mark Lorch who argues that "chemophobia is a chemist's construct" and that "it's time for us chemists to stop feeling so unloved." According to Lorch, "It is almost as if we are experiencing the fear of chemophobia: chemophobia-phobia."

Before we can hope to influence public attitudes we need to change our attitudes towards the public. We need to create new, positive associations instead of focusing on the old negative ones. We should avoid talking about chemophobia (Lorch suggests we hang up the #chemophobia hashtag) or framing our communications in negative terms such as "fighting ignorance" or "debunking errors". Instead we should try to be more positive, showing people how chemistry makes us feel and championing the cause of chemistry in society. Let's not forget that we are all acting as ambassadors for chemistry.

Breaking Bad has perhaps helped create public perceptions of chemistry as something powerful, important, and worth learning. Are there other even more positive portrayals of chemistry that chemists can refer non-chemist acquaintances to, and learn from themselves to speak about the practice of chemistry in a more positive way?


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  • (Score: 2) by MrNemesis on Wednesday August 19 2015, @05:32PM

    by MrNemesis (1582) on Wednesday August 19 2015, @05:32PM (#225094)

    Chemicals == scary for the same reason radiation == scary. Unless you've had a reasonably good science-based education and you cared enough to learn, all those long names are perfectly meaningless and it's impossible for the layperson to tell whether non-ionising radiation is as harmless as non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Generally speaking if you can't immediately see the "harmfulness" but you're told it's harmful anyway AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO PREVENT YOUR OWN MISERABLE AGONISING DEATH MR BOND BWAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA, then people are going to react negatively to the umbrella term.

    Take 'E442: ammonium phosphatides' as an example. Sounds terrifying but it's basically just glycerine and rapeseed oil - both entirely natural - and widely used as an emulsifier in foods. Likewise lots of the synthetics can sound equally awful (ye gods! A ferrocyanide!). In the same vein, DHMO.org [dhmo.org] (someone's mentioned that by now surely?) is the classic take on scaring people by wrapping something everyday and innocuous in "scary" technical language; if you don't understand the technical language you're just left with the scary part. Seeing some of the "points" made by the anti-vaccination movement brought up the same old stuff - "Look! Contains a MERCURY compound! Which is obviously going to kill you! Now hold on a second whilst I eat these crisps covered in delicious sodium and chlorine".

    As an aside, one of the silly songs we learnt in our first science classes teaching the importance of understanding labels goes:

    Henry Jones is dead and gone
    We won't see him no more
    Cos what he thought was H2O
    Was H2SO4

    I also can't really see why Breaking Bad is used as an example of a "positive" chemistry show; it was almost uniformly used to do Bad Things and after the first two series there was precious little even of that. And yes, the only other show I can think of now where chemistry played any meaningful part of the narrative was also MacGyver... physics and biology seems much better represented in drama.

    Exit stage left, looking for a chemistry documentary on BBC4.

    --
    "To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
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