Audience Orientation

Skills in dealing with science and trust in science are indispensable resources for individual and social orientation and decision-making. The decisive factor for rhetorical science communication is which audiences are to be addressed in a specific case. In classical rhetoric, this key feature of impact-oriented communication is referred to as aptum (Latin for appropriateness).

The ability to adopt perspectives is central to this. Rhetorically, communicative resistance can only ever be correctly assessed from the perspective of different audiences. This forms the basis for comprehensible and motivating communication. Many people are heavily involved in their everyday lives and are far removed from dealing explicitly with scientific topics. Science communication cannot succeed if it assumes a wholesale basic interest in science.

The ability to make communicative judgements requires the ability to take on perspectives and is an important goal of rhetorically grounded education and training in science communication: here, participants learn to assess communicative offers from the perspective of different audiences and to optimize them with regard to specific audiences. This also requires them to critically question their own positions and assumptions.

Cognitive psychology has a special role to play with regard to an empirically sound theory and practice of audience orientation. In this discipline, relevant building blocks have been developed in recent years to better understand the preconditions and success conditions of human communication, above all the terms "motivated reasoning", "metacognition" and "conceptual change". The RCS cooperates with the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM), which conducts internationally recognized cutting-edge research on these topics.