Stories — and Science

Stories. Science.

The stories we tell ourselves, and that we adopt from others, are weighing heavily on my mind. They are everywhere in life — including science.

I have started many draft posts over the last couple of months, but life has intervened in both positive and negative ways to keep me from finishing them. I’ll leave out the negative here – a positive has been my time spent as editor of the new Statisticians React to the News blog sponsored by the International Statistical Institute (ISI). The Editorial Advisory Committee (me, Ashley Steel, John Bailer, Peter Guttorp, and Andrew Gelman) have been recruiting a group of international contributors for weekly posts. Ashley and I recently discussed the blog, with John Bailer, in a Stats+Stories podcast that comes out today; which also keeps me stuck on the topic of stories.

I am currently fascinated by time spent thinking and reading about the complex connections between Stories and Science – and the role Statistics may play in our stories. I’m not to the point of having any sweeping or novel insights here, but wanted to get a few thoughts out on “paper.”

In my experiences as a scientist, I have often seen the following simple narrative: Doing science is supposed to be an “objective” story-free way of gathering information and knowledge, but then you should think about how to attach “a story” to the work if you hope to get publicity for your work and/or disseminate the work to a broad audience. That is, recognition of the fundamental importance of stories in how humans process information appears to come in after the science has been done.

There is acknowledgement of the power of a story in the context of dissemination to “lay-people” but there is little, if any, acknowledgement about how the power of story for all humans might be impacting the actual science being done. I see this as coming, at least in part, from another related narrative — that scientists, by their very nature and/or training, are able to rise above the cognitive challenges in logic and reasoning that hold down the rest of the “lay people” making up the “public.” To me, this is related to a scientist-as-hero narrative, as recently mentioned by Andrew Gelman on his blog (the post by coincidence features my kitten Tonks!) and I plan to say more on this in another post.

For many years now, I have cringed at statements implying (with seemingly no needed justification) that the process of doing science is “objective” and even scientists themselves are “objective.” Digging into what we mean by objective isn’t easy and hasn’t been overly productive for me so far. Today, I see the human brain’s creation and use of stories as maybe a way to steer a more productive, though related, conversation.

It is first important to acknowledge, and really sit with, the fact that scientists are humans — and all humans have a complicated relationship with stories that impacts all aspects of our lives. Scientists are part of the public, scientists are “lay people.” Scientists are not immune to relying on stories — and most importantly, scientists are not immune to a lack of awareness of how their attachment to stories may impact their work.

As humans, we have all had experiences (whether we have admitted it to ourselves or not) of firmly believing a story about our personal lives, about society, or about our work — only to realize later that there was little truth to the story and we just weren’t able to see it or didn’t know enough at the time to question it. And, it is very hard to let go of stories we have lived for many years — even in the face of information that the story deserves questioning.

There is nothing unscientific about considering the potential positive and negative implications of our attachment to stories on the process of doing and disseminating science. In fact, we continue to learn about how our brains process information through stories by doing science!

So, why should we operate under the assumption that scientists are able to rise above stories in their day-to-day work? Is this assumption just another story we like to live by because it brings us comfort in the context of great uncertainty and complexity?

[To be continued in future posts…]