Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey
From the point of view of a social scientist, the problem with this is that the question is posed the wrong way round! Instead of thinking about how ‘we’ (whoever we are) can change the behaviour of ‘them’, we should be thinking about how science can help citizens to understand their world better so that they can take action to achieve whatever they want to do.
In practical terms, that means finding out what people want to do and what the barriers to them doing it are, and then providing them with the knowledge to overcome those barriers.