---
title: "Public awareness of science"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_awareness_of_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:25:34.929290+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Public awareness of science (PAS) is a comprehensive concept encompassing all aspects of the awareness, attitudes, behaviors, opinions, and activities that comprise the relations between the general public or lay society as a whole and scientific knowledge and organization. This concept is also known as public understanding of science (PUS), or more recently, public engagement with science and technology (PEST). This approach is a recent development in the field of science communication research, which aims to explore the intricate relationships and interconnections between science, technology, and innovation on the one hand, and the general public on the other.
Initially, research in this domain concentrated on enhancing the public's understanding of scientific subjects, adhering to the principles of the information deficit model of science communication. However, this model has since been largely disregarded by researchers in the field of science communication. Instead, there is an increasing emphasis on understanding how the public chooses to use scientific knowledge and on the development of interfaces to mediate between expert and lay understandings of an issue. Newer frameworks of communicating science include the dialogue and the participation models. The dialogue model aims to create spaces for conversations between scientists and non-scientists to occur while the participation model aims to include non-scientists in the process of science.

== Major themes ==

The area integrates a series of fields and themes such as:

Citizen science
Consumer education
Fixed and mobile science exhibits
Media and science (medialisation of science)
Public controversies over science and technology
Public tours of research and development (R&D) parks, manufacturing companies, etc.
Science and art
Science communication in the mass media, Internet, radio, films and television programs
Science education for adults
Science fairs in schools and social groups
Science festivals
Science in popular culture
Science in text books and classrooms
Science museums, aquaria, planetaria, zoological parks, botanical gardens, etc.
Science social movements
Important lines of research are how to raise public awareness and public understanding of science and technology. Also, learning how the public feels and knows about science generally as well as individual subjects, such as genetic engineering, or bioethics. Research by Matthew Nisbet highlights several challenges in science communication, including the paradox that scientific success can create either trust or distrust in experts in different populations and that attitudes of trust are shaped by mostly socioeconomic rather than religious or ideological differences. A 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center found varying levels of trust in science by country, political leanings, and other factors.

== Bodmer report ==
The publication of the Royal Society's' report The Public Understanding of Science (or Bodmer Report) in 1985 is widely held to be the birth of the Public Understanding of Science movement in Britain. The report led to the founding of the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science and a cultural change in the attitude of scientists to outreach activities.

== Models of engagement ==

=== Contextualist model ===
In the 1990s, a new perspective emerged in the field with the classic study of Cumbrian Sheep Farmers' interaction with the Nuclear scientists in England. Brian Wynne demonstrated how the experts were ignorant or disinterested in taking into account the lay knowledge of the sheep farmers while conducting field experiments on the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear fallout on the sheep in the region. Because of this shortcoming from the side of the scientists, local farmers lost their trust in them. The experts were unaware of the local environmental conditions and the behaviour of sheep and this has eventually led to the failure of their experimental models. Following this study, scholars have studies similar micro-sociological contexts of expert-lay interaction and proposed that the context of knowledge communication is important to understand public engagement with science. Instead of large scale public opinion surveys, researchers proposed studies informed by sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). The contextualist model focuses on the social impediments in the bidirectional flow of scientific knowledge between experts and laypersons/communities.

=== Deliberative model ===
Scholars like Sheila Jasanoff have advanced the debate around public engagement with science by leveraging the theory of deliberative democracy to analyze the public deliberation of and participation in science through various institutional forms. Proponents of greater public deliberation argue it is a basic condition for decision making in democratic societies, even on science and technology issues. There are also attempts to develop more inclusive participatory models of technological governance in the form of consensus conferences, citizen juries, extended peer reviews, and deliberative mapping.