Cultivating scientific curiosity: Digitally-mediated approaches for promoting societal transformation through scientific curiosity and capacity.
Look, I don’t even know what numbers we are on now. The last one was 5.2.1 and it was emotional. Before that was a nested steps version 5.2. Something happened somewhere after all that, probably mainly todo with trying to fit into the page limit, and then the project didn’t work as MetaPlay anymore. It is now distilled to its core essence – curiosity. I’m very happy with it, and grateful for the process.
The overall aim of Sci-Curious is to develop a method that cultivates scientific curiosity in participants, leading to better engagement in and between local contributor groups who incorporate experience-based expertise. This will be achieved firstly through developing a digitally mediated deep canvassing method that incorporates elements of intractable scientific challenges and designed to cultivate curiosity through game design principles, and then using this method as an intervention to engage participants in two Biosphere Reserves.
If successful, this European fellowship will be conducted at the Biodiversity and Sustainability Solutions (BISONS) Lab (University of Turku, Finland), by the fellow Bernelle Verster, under the supervision of the recognized Dr. Ricardo Correia.
My main hypothesis is that stimulating individual scientific curiosity can promote behavioral change in engagement with politically charged scientific questions. Specifically, I posit that
- It is possible to cultivate a transformative shift in participants perception through the use of a digitally mediated narrative methodology,
- Deep canvassing is a suitable method to reduce scientific prejudice and raise curiosity towards politically charged scientific questions, and
- Enhanced curiosity can impact individual behavior related to participation as well as their engagement with relevant networks and decision-making processes.
Having said that, with the deadline in a week and a bunch of small niggles left to do, I’m bored. So, meme time, hence Gru (adapted from artpictures). The main “niggle” is a glaring gap in how curiosity plus deep canvassing gets to transformative change. Ricardo suggested an image to help clarify the context, methods and implementation of the project. After updating my CV (leading to more crying: I did not realise the trauma of 2018!) I thought today is a good day to mess around with images.
I need to unpack why I got to curiosity, and then I need some science to back the Individual changes affecting group behaviour. My AI suggested Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, who have studied how individual actions spread through networks, affecting group dynamics. Their work shows how small changes in individual behavior can lead to larger shifts in group behavior. Ricardo suggested the COM-B model: Capacity, Opportunity, Motivation: Behaviour.
I’m fooling around on excalidraw. Maybe the stuff makes it back here, maybe not.