Marine litter: Social representations and persuasion in science communication through infographics

Although there is a current well stablished role for infographics in science communication, not a lot of attention has been given to audiences' previous representations regarding topics depicted in infographics, or how these affect the effectiveness of communication. This research aims to clarify the role of social representations on participants' levels of effortful thinking and attitude formation when these are processing persuasive science communication messages via digital infographics, with a focus on the recent environmental topic of marine litter. Participants were 310 undergraduate college students from the Arts faculty of the University of Porto. Our research falls into three main steps.First, in accordance with the theory of social representations, participants were investigated about how they are representing the theme of marine litter. Secondly, a redesign of an multimedia infographic about marine litter took place, in order to include gathered participants' social representations on the topic. An already published online digital infographic about marine litter, developed by a Portuguese newspaper team, was used as a basis for the redesign process. In a third step, participants were randomly assigned to one out of two conditions of infographic processing - in the first condition, the infographic used was the one developed by the newspaper team; in the second condition, the redesigned infographic, which attended to participants' social representations, was used. Levels of elaboration or effortful thinking of both situations were collected and are currently being measured and compared to best understand if attending to participants' social representations while designing infographics for communicating scientific topics improved the persuasion levels in participants. Data was collected through a questionnaire with three distinct parts; a free association assessment of marine litter and infographics related social representations and a marine litter related knowledge assessment; two attitudinal scales related first with the marine litter topic, and, secondly, with infographics; and, finally, an assessment of participants' sociodemographic information. Partial results regarding the first step of the research were already analysed. The social representations of 190 participants regarding "marine litter" brought terms like "pollution", "death" and "plastics"; but this representation didn't include more specific terms like "microplastics" or "litter ingestion". Comparably, the representation of "infographics" seemed not to be evenly present in our participants, as 57% of participants affirmed not to know what an infographic was. Nevertheless, in the cases where participants knew what an it was, the representation revolved around terms like "imagetics", "information" and "graphics", which although consistent with the denotative meaning of an infographic, does not tell us much about its connotative social meaning. Expected further results are an increase on participants' elaboration levels when they processed the infographic message that was redesigned to attend to their social representations on marine litter, when compared to the situation in which such message was not redesigned. This study is significant for the area of science communication, as it will help to clarify the role of social representations in the construction of scientific messages for non-specialist audiences.