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Civic Science Fellow Soobin Choi explores how to communicate science in polarized contexts

When Soobin Choi first arrived in the United States from South Korea to pursue her Ph.D. in environmental and science communication, she couldn’t stop thinking about the deep political polarization around an issue that some nations treat as a shared scientific reality.

“In Korea, climate change is a somewhat politicized issue,” Choi says. “But I’ve learned that in the United States, it’s even more politicized and polarized. And it’s a big country, so we need people who are here to act in order for climate change mitigation efforts to make a difference worldwide.”

Now, as a Civic Science Fellow at the Morgridge Institute for Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she’s developing evidence-based approaches to communicate many kinds of science in polarized environments.

“I think a lot about how to communicate different topics related to science, emerging science, and environment to people across ideological or value-based fault lines,” she says. “We’re trying to make these topics resonate with different groups of people.”

From Personal Frustration to Global Challenge

Choi’s interest in communication strategies began with a deeply personal challenge: trying to convince her father to quit smoking.

“My dad used to be a really heavy smoker,” she says. “Ever since I could cognitively think about these actions, I was like, I really want him to stop. I tried various different strategies, and I succeeded in none of them.”

The experience sparked an interest in Choi, and during her undergraduate studies in communication at Korea University, she discovered health communication research, which involves systematic approaches to understanding why people resist health messages and how to motivate behavior change. And just as she started graduate school at the University of Michigan, her dad decided to quit smoking.

Choi intended to focus her graduate work on health communication, so she was surprised to be paired with an advisor specializing in environmental communication, including climate change. But she soon recognized that both fields deal with how people process risk information and make decisions.

What particularly fascinated her about climate communication was an added degree of complexity. “When it comes to environmental issues, there’s another layer,” she says. “If you do this, change this behavior, it’s good for you, like with health decisions. But for it to work out for the world, everybody else has to do it, too. That collective dynamic is super interesting.”

Beyond One-Way Communication

At the Science Communication Incubator Lab at Morgridge and UW-Madison, Choi’s Fellowship focuses on understanding and improving how scientists engage with the public. One of her key projects involves interviewing scientists at the Morgridge Institute to understand their perspectives on public engagement. What motivates them to share their work? What barriers do they face? How does organizational culture shape these interactions?

“A lot of scientists’ perceptions about public engagement revolve around the idea that public engagement means activities that are basically one-way,” Choi says. “Like public talks, public outreach, K-12 education.”

This distinction between one-way information delivery and genuine two-way dialogue is crucial to Choi’s work. She’s interested not just in how scientists can better explain their research, but in creating structures that enable meaningful exchange between scientific communities and the broader public.

“We’re trying to understand the importance of culture and infrastructure in that process,” she says. “It’s one thing for scientists to know that public engagement is important and to want to do it. And it’s another thing for there to be infrastructure to support these people in a way that they could do the engagement that they want.”

A Framework for Harmony

While climate change remains a central focus in her work, Choi is also exploring how to communicate about emerging scientific issues, particularly artificial intelligence. One of her key projects examines different ways to communicate about AI’s environmental impact. ChatGPT and similar large language models require significant computing resources and energy consumption, but this often goes unnoticed amid discussions of AI’s capabilities.

“The project focuses on thinking about different ways to communicate the increasing energy use of AI,” she says. “There are different emphasis frames that one can employ to do that, and we’re studying how different segments of the public react differently to these various frames.”

Using survey experiments, Choi and her colleagues are testing how these framing choices affect people’s understanding of AI’s environmental footprint, their perception of risks, and their support for potential policies to address these issues.

This research is an example of a connecting thread throughout Choi’s work: finding ways to harmonize scientific progress with societal values—a core principle of civic science. By identifying shared concerns across different ideological positions, Choi hopes to develop communication strategies that resonate more broadly.

Adding Social Science to the Mix

Effective science communication must address not just the facts of an issue, but also people’s belief that their action can make a difference, Choi says. Without addressing these psychological barriers, even the clearest information can fail to motivate change.

For example, when Choi talks with friends back home in South Korea about climate change, many express a sense of futility about individual or even national action when larger countries lag behind.

“A lot of my friends in Korea have this feeling of hopelessness or inefficacy about climate change,” she says. They often mention recycling as an example, she says, asking what difference their efforts can make if the United States doesn’t recycle properly.

“I sometimes felt that hopelessness in graduate school, thinking this doesn’t make any difference, I’m the only one who cares,’” she says. “But you’re not. There’s this group of people everywhere in the world that do this work. You just need to find them.”

For Choi, one of the most valuable aspects of the Civic Science Fellowship has been finding and connecting with so many others working on similar challenges across different contexts and disciplines. This network provides not just professional support, but also a reminder of the broader community of people working to strengthen the connections between science and society. It’s a perspective that helps counter the isolation that can come with specialized academic work. 

“As you get your degree and become a sophisticated academic, the more you narrow into the work that you do,” Choi says. “It’s sometimes hard to realize that there’s all these different paths.”

She’s particularly excited that social science has a part in the work many Fellows are doing. “It’s easy to overlook the fact that it does play a big role.”

Choi also appreciates that Morgridge, which is primarily a biomedical institution, has added a group of social scientists to the mix. The Science Communication Incubator Lab works together with the Institute’s scientists to get their messages heard.

As she continues her work, now connecting remotely from Seoul while maintaining her research collaborations in Wisconsin, Choi reflects on the global nature of both scientific challenges and their solutions.

“Making great advancements in bench science and process is great,” she says. “But how do we make that matter for society? How do we use it to move forward?”

Soobin’s Civic Science Fellowship at the Morgridge Institute for Research is supported by the Rita Allen Foundation and Morgridge Institute for Research.