ABSTRACT:The present article scrutinizes the manner with which a group of three postsecondary students (in Quebec, Canada) describe the social actors concerned by the controversy surrounding cellular telephones. The study was conducted on the basis of an ethnographic approach. Participant observation was performed by the researcher for 3 hours during each of 15 weeks. The theoretical framework developed by Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe (2001) was drawn on to show how the group assigns roles relating to public representation and the production of legitimate knowledges; in particular, it assigns to scientists the role of conducting research; to government the roles of building citizens' awareness about the risks related to cellular telephone use, protecting users, and guiding the conduct of the cellular telephone industry; and to citizens the roles of becoming/staying informed and of making limited use of cellular telephones. The study reported here also illustrates that, in the process, the group airs their views concerning the terms best suited to defining the subject of the controversy, constituting research "collectives," and disseminating knowledge. One main conclusion is that science education research projects drawing on the contributions of Callon et al. (2001) hold out considerable promise in terms of relevance and fruitfulness.
Previous work has shown that sensory pleasure is both the motor and the sign of optimal behaviors aimed at physiological ends. From an evolutionary psychology point of view it may be postulated that mental pleasure evolved from sensory pleasure. Accordingly, the present work tested empirically the hypothesis that pleasure signals efficacious mental activity. In Experiment 1, ten subjects played video-golf on a Macintosh computer. After each hole they were invited to rate their pleasure or displeasure on a magnitude estimation scale. Their ratings of pleasure correlated negatively with the difference par minus performance, i.e., the better the performance the greater the pleasure reported. In Experiments 2 and 3, the pleasure of reading poems was correlated with comprehension, both rated by two groups of subjects, science students and arts students. In the majority of science students pleasure was significantly correlated with comprehension. Only one arts student showed this relationship; this result suggests that the proposed relationship between pleasure and cognitive efficiency is not tautological. Globally, the results support the hypothesis that pleasure is aroused by the same mechanisms, and follows the same laws, in physiological and cognitive mental tasks and also leads to the optimization of performance.
Scientists are often asked to interact with the public, but a lack of training and knowledge of the latest research and ideas about science communication can make them both reluctant and ill‐equipped to do so.
This article is situated in contemporary debates about the ways to achieve a scientific literacy that encourages a greater lay participation in public debates and political decision making. Drawing on the notion of "relationship to scientific experts" (in French, "rapport aux experts scientifiques"), I explore the ways in which a group of 3 Quebec postsecondary students describe the relationships they hold toward people whom they consider to be scientific experts, as revealed during a project in which they investigated the controversy surrounding cellular telephone use. To this end, I scrutinize how the members of the group go about describing scientific experts and picture a prospective face-to-face discussion with a scientific expert. The data come from a case study (conducted over a 15-week period). The findings show that the group maintains a relationship of intimidation by scientific experts, in which the latter are depicted in terms of their knowledge and qualifications. Accordingly, the group was overawed not only by the accumulation of knowledge held and produced by scientific experts but also by the latter's research experience and the high social recognition they occasionally enjoyed. Similarly, the group describes a prospective face-to-face discussion with a doctor or a researcher in terms of an impersonal, intimidating encounter during which its members' learning and comprehension in relation to the controversy are assumed to be unequal to the task. The implications of the findings for future research are discussed.
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