2020 Volume 18 Pages 208-220
A crisis of trust in science was caused in the UK and in Europe in the late 1990s because of difficulties with BSE and GMOs. This predicament led to changes in the existing policy of promoting activities aiming to enhance the PUS. Instead, the establishment of a two-way communication with the public was mooted. People came to accept the view that the one-way communication model, the standard method for PUS-activities, was integrated with the deficit model. This one-way method of communication thus came to be criticized because of the growing doubt about the validity of the deficit model and because of the increasing belief that two-way communication was desirable. We call this opinion“ the bipolar evaluation of deficit and dialogue” and endeavor to make two points: first, the deficit model and the one-way communication method should be distinguished; and second, the bipolar evaluation of deficit and dialogue makes people misunderstand the functions and value of both one-way and two-way communication techniques and may even mislead science policy. Subsequently, this paper proposes four classification methods to distinguish science communication activities through two dimensions: one representing the presence or absence of the deficit model, and the other representing one-way / two-way communication.
