Japan Geoscience Union Meeting 2015

Presentation information

Oral

Symbol M (Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary) » M-ZZ Others

[M-ZZ45] Geoscience Studies: historical, philosophical and STS studies

Sun. May 24, 2015 11:00 AM - 12:45 PM 203 (2F)

Convener:*Michiko Yajima(Tokyo Medical and Dentel University), Shigeyuki Aoki(Center for Cultural Research and Studies, University of Aizu), Toshihiro Yamada(Chiba Prefectural Funabashi High School), Shigeo Yoshida(Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, Kyushu University), Chair:Toshihiro Yamada(Chiba Prefectural Funabashi High School), Michiko Yajima(Tokyo Medical and Dentel University)

12:30 PM - 12:45 PM

[MZZ45-07] Science of Science Communication: Technical Method and Mind Climate to be linked together

*Fuki UENO1, Mineo KUMAZAWA2, Minao KUKITA3, Takahiro OTANI3 (1.Chukyo University, 2.Tokyo Institute of Technology, 3.Nagoya University)

Keywords:Science Communication

Recent decades have transformed our societies into information societies, while increasing their democratization. The citizens are now capable of gathering large amounts of information by themselves and attempt to make informed decisions on a variety of social issues. Society-wide decision-making requires building a consensus among large number of individuals which, given the abundance of often contradictory or misleading information, is far from easy to achieve.
We consider the consensus-building process as requiring involved parties to achieve a level of understanding not only on logical grounds but also emotional ones. We believe the role of the latter is largely underappreciated in group consensus-building and emotions such as fear or distrust often play a much bigger role than the actual understanding on logical grounds. We call these emotional factors that influence society-wide behavior and thinking a current "mind climate".
We believe that understanding how "mind climate" emerges in modern societies is essential to understanding how we build group-consensus. And although the term may seem intuitive, what exactly should be considered a part of "mind climate" needs to be defined first. We will report the results of our discussions aiming to clarify the concept of "mind climate" and introduce an experiment we conceived to identify factors that are necessary for making consensus-building more efficient.

This work is supported by the Collaboration Research Program of IDEAS, Chubu University: IDEAS201404