Probability Games, Workshops, and the Social World of International Science Communication

Abstract

Probabilistic thinking underpins a wide range of scientific claims, but effectively communicating probabilistic information across audiences is challenging. In this article, we present a political–institutional approach to science that harnesses the social relationships between the people working as scientists and the public using scientific innovations. First, we show how we learned to use games and local analogies to effectively communicate probabilistic seasonal forecasts of weather and crop yields with farmers, extension workers, and water managers in Ethiopia. Second, we show how workshops—the unglamorous institutional workhorse of international development and scientific enterprises—became warmhearted events when organized around the fundamental fact of social connections between researchers and the community members and between the community members themselves. Scientists in an international scientific collaboration may not be able to become longstanding members of every community, but our approach to workshopping—and to research networks—allowed us to be engidoch (in English, guests), to tap into rich social ties to harness the humor, goodwill, and commitment that is hard to muster when scientists engage with community members as unconnected, nameless “workshop participants.”