I was not cool in high school. I think it would be a stretch to say I was a nerd, but I wasn’t cool and I certainly wasn’t getting laid.
No, like so many scientists and science writers in the world, I mostly kept my head down and waited for college. You see, it’s in college (or maybe even grad school) that most science-loving students come into their own, go to parties and have sex. We have to wait for an environment where understanding game theory or the Krebs cycle makes for engaging conversation rather than a reason to shove us in our lockers.
Now, I’m not complaining, it all shakes out pretty well in the end. The nerds create billion-dollar companies and win Nobel prizes while the high school cool kids occasionally become action stars but mostly fizzle out. But here’s the thing. The rise of popular pseudoscience in society has convinced me that we need to change all this.
As a nation, we need to recruit the cool kids into science, technology, engineering, and math. Our very future depends on it.
It’s time to stop thinking that the debate over evolution, climate change, vaccines and genetically modified organisms will be worked out through logic and reasoning. Anyone who can be reasoned with is already on our side. And even then, we’re lucky to break 50 percent of the American public siding with clear scientific consensus. So it’s time to start coming up with radical solutions. We need to hire the cool kids.
I would argue – and to a large extent sociology and psychology nerds agree with me – that people believe celebrities because they want to be them. Aspiration breeds trust.
Take the latest vaccination troubles. On the one side you have the vast majority of the world’s nerds – thoughtful, acerbic, huge Battlestar Gallactica fans. On the other, you have Jenny McCarthy, a former high school cheerleader who wore her school sweater for a Playboy spread. She doesn’t have logic or expertise on her side, all she has is aspirational appeal.
The average person (perhaps not the people who read this blog, mind you) sees McCarthy and wants to be her. Psychology tells us this is extremely powerful. Believe it or not, there is a long history of fascinating science on this topic – done by brilliant men and women who likely were not getting laid in high school. Studies have shown that after steroid-infused slugger Mark McGuire (who was definitely getting laid in high school) broke the home run record, people were more likely to consider using the supplements he claimed gave him his bulk.
And it’s not new. No high schooler in history was cooler than Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli. And after just one stupid episode of Happy Days where The Fonz gets a library card, the US library system was overwhelmed by requests for library cards. In Nigeria contraception use in the 90s shot up a quarter after a popular singer released songs saying it was a good idea. And of course there’s the infamous 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate where the latter properly understood the power of television.
Marketers have studied this for decades. According to marketing psychologists (who definitely were not getting laid in high school), if a celebrity’s image matches a person’s “ideal self-image,” they are far more likely to believe him/her and buy whatever they are hawking.
And we don’t even have to be conscious of it. One clever team of marketing researchers even digitally blended Tiger Woods and George W Bush until they came up with a face that was a bizarre mix of the two. People intrinsically rated that face as oddly trustworthy, even though they couldn’t recognize it. Then the researchers upped the ante. They added just 35% of Tiger’s features to a random stock photo model and subjects reported trusting the Tiger-enhanced version more than the original.
Tiger Woods, I should mention, was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in high school.
This is who we are. It’s about time we got used to it. Now, it’s not that science doesn’t have its cool kid advocates. As a science writer, I appreciate Kristen Bell supporting vaccines and George Clooney backing mainstream climate science. Really, thanks guys. But then when we meet the actual experts doing the work, and all we can think is, “God, I want to shove that guy into a trash can to shut him up.”
The future of climate change now has nothing to do with good science. It has to do with winning an argument. And it’s an argument, I hate say, we seem to be losing.
Look, I don’t like having to write this. I truly wish that the climate change, vaccine, and evolution debate could be won purely on evidence. But we need to face the fact that if they could be, they would have been by now. These debates have moved beyond the science realm and into the public and political ones. The realm where tribe and identity matter more than data. Where the spokesman matters more than the speech.
And look at the spokesmen we choose. No disrespect to Bill Nye or Alan Alda – it’s fair to say that they are the “ideal self-image” of many nerds of my generation. But we already have those people on our side.
Nor is it going to be someone like me – a gangly kid who didn’t impress girls until he grew into his frame in his mid-20s. No, we need to cultivate a whole new crop of spokesmen and women. We need to offer science scholarships to cheerleaders and football stars. We need to create special science classes for prom kings and queens. We need to offer free science tutoring to teenagers who frequent the local family planning clinic.
Unless…
Maybe they are already out there. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe hidden in laboratories and in front of chalkboards around the world there are scores of undiscovered hot, charismatic scientists hiding from the spotlight. People who mainstream America actually wants to be.
If you are a virologist who is secretly high school prom royalty, stand up. If you had lots of sex under the bleachers at 17 and today spend your days programming climate models, raise your hand. Guys, shave that scraggly beard, go to Banana Republic and buy a V-neck sweater that actually fits you. Women, wax the brows and get a Brazilian blow-out.
Embrace your inner cool kid. And I don’t mean nerd cool, I mean actual cool. Aspirational cool. And if, like me, you don’t have such a person inside you, don’t talk bad about colleagues who do. We need these people. Because God knows the pseudoscience nut jobs will take them if we don’t.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock
Author’s Note: I cannot take credit for the hygiene recommendations at the end. They come directly from a frustrated communications officer at an large, undisclosed, independant laboratory. This person also recommended proper deoderant.
Eric,
As a former communications officer at a large national lab I applaud you. It used to be like pulling teeth to encourage graduate students to do outreach activities. That particular activity was not rewarded by their thesis advisor and therefore must not be important. We have to hit this problem from both sides of the spectrum. Both the encouragement side and the reward side. There just shouldn’t be a downside for a scientist who is willing to share their knowledge with others.
In the UK we have Brain Cox, go to scientist for all things astrophysical and these days more or less anything else. He used to be the keyboard player for D:Ream, you can’t get much cooler than an actual chart topping pop star telling you about the cosmos.
Cool kid standing up! I was a cheerleader in High School, have a Masters degree in Biotechnology, and am having the hardest time getting hired. I feel my look and personality work against me at times. I get comments like “I could never envision you in a lab” from people in my field! It is ridiculous. We are out there, we are just the last ones to get hired. I have been offered more creative jobs than science jobs.
Why go to all that trouble. Just pay existing celebrities to mouth sound bites of your required message. Over and over and over again, for the benefit of the hard of thinking. “When in Rome etc” and “don’t beat them join them” rolled into one winning strategy.
There might be pushback from the nerds though – along the lines of “If that idiot believes it, it must be wrong”.
Yeah, I thought about this. But here’s the thing, celebrities already do agree with many of these scientific arguments and it hasn’t helped. I think that’s because it’s not really all that convincing for some famous person to hop on at the end. The aspirational person agrees with the scientist but I’d like to see a situation where the aspirational person IS the scientist. Where the person doing the work is seen as someone you want to be.