What motivates people to defend science: Evidence from the 2017 March for science

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE What motivates people to defend science: Evidence from the 2017 March for science Eryn Campbell ID1,2, John Kotcher2*, Teresa Myers2, John Cook3, Amanda C. Borth2, Edward Maibach2 1 University of Pennsylvania, Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America, 2 George Mason University, Center for Climate Change Communication, Fairfax, Virginia, United States of America, 3 University of Melbourne, Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia * a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Campbell E, Kotcher J, Myers T, Cook J, Borth AC, Maibach E (2023) What motivates people to defend science: Evidence from the 2017 March for science. PLoS ONE 18(11): e0290222. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290222 Editor: Cengiz Erisen, Yeditepe University, TURKEY Received: August 22, 2022 Abstract The 2017 March for Science was an international march organized in response to concerns over the Trump administration’s misuse of science that drew unprecedented numbers of supporters as well as attention from the media, celebrities, and political figures. The March’s turnout and publicity begs the question: what motivates people to defend science? Using data from a survey of March for Science listserv members in the US, we used a structural equation model to test posited relationships between self- and collective response efficacy, perceived threat, anger, fear, and the intention to engage in advocacy to defend science. We found that each of these constructs were associated with the intention to engage in advocacy, illuminating the motivators that lead to this intention and how individuals may be activated to engage on behalf of science in the future. These insights have both theoretical and practical significance, as advocacy is integral for both supporting and advancing factbased policy- and decision-making. Accepted: August 4, 2023 Published: November 16, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Campbell et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All of the data— including for data for the other two survey paths— are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/2a9s5/. Funding: Energy Foundation and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Throughout history, scientists have engaged in advocacy when they felt their efforts could make a difference for society. For example, Sherwood Rowland famously called for the phasing out of chlorofluorocarbons to protect the ozone layer, and Albert Einstein notably spoke out against the rise of fascism in Germany [1,2]. Although advocacy to defend science is not necessarily a new phenomenon, events such as the formation of a political action committee to support scientists running for public office and the organization of mass demonstrations in defense of science have led some to assert that we have entered a new era of heightened political engagement by scientists and their supporters [3,4]. A notable example was the 2017 March for Science—an international event organized in response to concerns over the Trump administration’s misuse of science [3,5]. The March drew tens of thousands of participants globally and garnered substantial media coverage and the attention of celebrities and political figures, such as then President Trump [3,5]. The overwhelming participation in and publicity of the March made it a significant development in the way that scientists and the science-interested public mobilized to defend and advance shared goals through advocacy. PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290222 November 16, 2023 1 / 19 PLOS ONE What Motivates People to Defend Science? Evidence from the 2017 March for Science After the March in 2017, we conducted a survey of subscribers to the March for Science listserv to investigate the perceptions, attitudes, and motivations of people interested in the March, including scientists and non-scientists [6]. As evidence of the unprecedented mobilization it spurred, most US participants (88%) reported the March as the first science-related march they had ever participated in. This raises an important question: what motivates people to defend science? To begin answering this question, we analyzed the 2017 survey responses of people in the US, testing a series of hypotheses about the role of self- and collective response efficacy, perceived threat, anger, and fear in predicting their intention to engage in advocacy to defend science. Literature review The terms advocacy and collective action have both been used to represent actions such as participating in marches or protests, voting, signing petitions, and contacting elected officials. However, there are important similarities and differences between the conceptual definitions of these constructs that guided our decision to use the term advocacy to reflect our work. Collective action has traditionally been defined as actions that seek to improve the status or influence of a group [7,8]. More recently, collective action has been defined as, “any action that individuals undertake as group members to pursue group goals such as social change” [9, p. 122]. Further, collective action is most often used to refer to marches, protests, demonstrations, and rallies [9,10,11], although actions like signing petitions and voting have also been characterized as collective action [10]. Conversely, advocacy refers to taking action in support of a cause, idea,proposal, or policy [12–16]. Advocacy has been used to represent a wide range of actions, including but not limited to contacting elected officials, directly interacting with policymakers, writing blogs, attending public demonstrations and marches, being involved in collaborative decision-making processes, discussing an issue with others, and promoting an issue or policy via social media [16–18]. A key difference between advocacy and collective action is that advocacy does not necessarily seek to pursue the goals of a specific group, and therefore may be considered a broader term. While the March itself may be considered an example of collective action, in this study we measured people’s intentions to engage in a diverse range of future actions—such as contacting government officials, discussing science-related issues on- and offline with friends and family, participating in a march or demonstration among others—specifically to “reduce harm to science from the current Congress and the president”. Th (...truncated)