Journalism and Social Media as Means of Observing the Contexts of Science

The transformation of today’s mass media system leads to uncertainty about communication behaviors concerning scientific issues. So far, few researchers have investigated this issue among scientists. We conducted a survey of neuroscientists in Germany and the United States in which we asked them about their own information-seeking behaviors and their assessment of the influence of various types of “old” and “new” media on public opinion and political decisionmaking. Our findings suggest that neuroscientists continue to use traditional journalistic media more often than blogs and social networks for information seeking but perceive all of these channels to have a strong influence on public opinion and political decisionmaking processes.