Framing Aquaculture: Uncovering the factors behind aquaculture perceptions

Corinne

Welcome to Salty Talks, a podcast about sustainable aquaculture in Maine. I'm your host, Corinne Neufi, the communications specialist with the Aquaculture Research Institute. And today I am joined by Laura Ricard at the University of Maine. And we're going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects, public perceptions of aquaculture. So, Laura, will you introduce yourself? Let us know who you are, your background, and how you became interested in using aquaculture to study concepts such as social acceptability and sense of place and whatnot

Laura

t then I guess I would say in: 2015

Corinne

Thank you. Yeah, I've never, I don't think ever seen a job posting that was asking for risk. What did you say? Risk risk communication. Communication. Yeah. Which is super cool. And we were talking the other day about work that you were doing in Washington with being in the parks and people getting injured in the parks. And I think I said something like, why would anyone blame getting injured on the parks? I don't get that. I definitely would blame it on myself. And Laura immediately had all of these things to say about reasons why it was just things I would never think about. So I think it's really cool to then put that into context in Aquaculture. I think. I want to start off broad here and talk a bit about your research focusing on public perceptions of Aquaculture and why that's important for just overall ensuring social acceptability.

Laura

Sure. I think we can think about this on a few different levels, and I guess starting off with an individual level. So if we think of obviously ourselves as individual units, which is a little bit contrived, because we know that we all live in societies and we have connections with others, so we're never really making decisions in isolation. But let's, for the sake of argument, think of ourselves as individuals. How we think about a topic like Aquaculture can really influence what we might call our kind of downstream perceptions, no pun intended, but our judgments, our decision making. So if I view aquaculture as really beneficial, something that can alleviate hunger or can provide a healthy, low cost protein source that might be, then obviously something that influences me when I go to the polls later and have to think about which candidate I'm voting for. And maybe if they're talking about policy decisions related to Aquaculture in our towns. So we know that individual level 1s perceptions matter for things like decision making. However. 1s Social acceptability is, as I say, it's not just an individual level thing. We have to think about it at community levels, even society levels. So at a community level, perhaps we can think about it in the aggregate. So, you know, does the majority of the people living in a particular location think that aquaculture is a good thing for them? But also here's where you bring in a whole bunch of other factors that really get us out of just the individual brain. So do we trust the people that are coming in to operate aquaculture in our community? Is it a multinational corporation? And maybe we're not trusting of them because they're, as we like to say in Maine, they're from away. Does that matter to us? So things like trust, things like do we have any experience as a community with this kind of technology in the past? Like, are we going to compare aquaculture to our community's focus on sustainable farming, land based farming, or do we think about aquaculture as competition for wildcatch fisheries? These are things we might have opinions about on an individual level, but again, we have to think about them collectively because as a community, as a town, as whatever, we have an identity as well. And that really matters for how a place comes to make decisions about aquaculture.

Corinne

That sounds like there is a lot of information gathering that then has to happen, which I would say occurs at an individual level and then kind of makes its way up to a community level. So in your experience conducting surveys and carrying out the work that you've done, what have you found to be key factors that I guess motivate or influence people to seek out information on aquaculture, to understand all these different factors that you were just talking about?

Laura

me survey work that we did in: 2018

Corinne

Do you think that motivation seeking of where people want to be is regionally dependent or? Depends on what's going on. Like, for example, people living in Belfast where a Rasp facility was going to be placed versus people who maybe live like, I don't know, I've only lived in Maine for nine month

Laura

ent survey data, but that was: 2018

Corinne

Yeah, that is actually quite surprising to me that you found there's not that sort of pressure, because anecdotally like. 2s Me just being so immersed in aquaculture. I will tell my parents about it, I'll tell my friends, my family about it. And from that then I can see that they are motivated and seeking out, wanting to learn more about aquaculture. And I'm constantly getting questions or information updates from them about their knowledge, which is fun to see. But yeah, I guess a little surprised to hear those results.

Laura

Yeah, I wonder too. That makes me think sometimes it's just that really initial lack of familiarity and we've found this a lot in our work both at the national scale and in Maine. And again, I think that's changing because the familiarity as the years go by and as these proposals pop up all over the state, that familiarity will go up. But if you don't never heard of it before, you just may not have that initial push. But as soon as your friend asks you about it, it's like, oh, maybe that is something that's relevant to me and I should look into that some more.

Corinne

Yeah, like getting over that initial learning barrier. Yeah. So I know that you've also examined the awareness of aquaculture among Maine and was it Massachusetts residents and the content that's in newspapers and that we're seeing in media. So do you think that the information from newspapers or I guess any form of media can influence the way in which people think about aquaculture in terms of for those that aren't even remotely familiar with it to begin with? Does seeing the way that news presents aquaculture make people think of perceived environmental risks or economic benefits? Or does that sort of set their 1s mind frame?

Laura

Yeah, it's an important question and I think it's one that deserves taking a step back and making sure we clarify what media can and can't do. So media in general, especially we're talking here, at least this research was looking at legacy newspapers. So in particular Portland Press Herald, which is out of Portland, Maine, bangor Daily News out of Bangor and the Boston Globe. And what news media can do is they can sort of provide or. 2s Set an agenda. That's the way we might call it. We tend to call it media and communication scholars. So they can sort of suggest to us as readers what is important, you know, what rises to the top amid all of the stuff that's going on in the world at any point in time. What newspapers can't directly do is to tell us what to think, so they can tell us what to think about. So they can say, say, 1s we're going to have 15 articles on aquaculture between now and next Friday. And so just that sheer volume that suggests to you, reader, that this is an important topic you should pay attention to. However, newspapers cannot sort of as a silver bullet, tell me, Laura, you should now think that aquaculture is really important and you should support this new venture in your community. So they're not telling me what opinion to have. There's not this really direct, 1s again, silver bullet, like, I'm going to change your opinion, but the more we're exposed and the more we're suggested that this is important, 1s that can have an effect. So it's sort of indirect. But also, and you mentioned this a little bit in the way you're asking the question, the framing matters. And that's what we looked at quite a bit with aquaculture coverage in those three newspapers that I mentioned. So when the Bangor Daily News, for instance, reports on aquaculture, is it reporting on aquaculture such that we see benefits of aquaculture more frequently than we see risks? Reported on framing is not the same as spin. So we're not saying, oh, are they making stuff up about the risks or inflating the benefits? No, it's anytime you present information, you can focus on one thing rather than others. You can talk about 1s aquaculture as fish farming, you can talk about it as factory fish farming. Those word choices matter.

Corinne

Do you think you've seen a shift in terms of how news articles regarding aquaculture have been presented since you've been doing this work? Because I feel like even within the last, I don't know, like five years or since I've really been focused on aquaculture, I've definitely seen a shift, and I don't know if that's me moving from Washington to Maine or just as time progresses and more people are getting on board with aquaculture.

Laura

s Has mostly stopped around: 2015

Corinne

People, they're getting their news from, like we're mentioning Portland Press Herald, Bangor Daily News, and this might have some sort of influence on people's risk perceptions. But what about or I guess. 2s Do you think that more people's risk perceptions are coming from news outlets or other direct experiences? So I'm talking about direct experiences with people that work in Aquaculture or work in WILDCAPTURE fisheries or something like that or from maybe this is a two part question, but or from extrapolating what we know about agriculture and terrestrial farms and then trying to apply that to Aquaculture.

Laura

Yes, to all of that and this is why it's so hard. But also, I think really fun to study this area because from what we can tell, it's a little bit of all of those things you mentioned. So yes, we are going to 1s look at how Aquaculture is covered in the news and that's probably going to in some way contribute to how we understand it, how we perceive risk associated with it. But we know too that having those direct experiences like going to a farmer's market in Portland and seeing a mussel farmer, we had someone in a focus group actually mention that very example in Portland. She said, I know this person and they have a farm like down the road. For me that is very important, developing perceptions. 2s So we have mediated experiences on the one hand, which would be the reading about it in the news, the direct experiences, which might be actually talking to a mussel farmer. We also have how people, as you suggested, extrapolate from other things in their life that they might see as somehow similar. And so, in particular, terrestrial agriculture and wild capture fisheries. And this has been documented not just by me at all, like other folks too, this is a really sort of familiar and easy, I guess, analogy to make. And it can go both ways in terms of whether it's having people support aquaculture or not. So they can say, oh, it's like a small family farm on the water. What a nice mussel farm. Those are some nice, friendly farmers, right? That might be good. 1s Alternatively, we've had heard people say in focus groups things like, oh, you know what they do with farming? They select for the biggest chicken, and then you have Rhode Island reds or the only chickens that are bred, and then we lose diversity. They're going to do the same thing in salmon farms. And so that's a negative thing. So you're using a farming metaphor, and it could go either way. Same thing with fisheries. It could be, oh, aquaculture is this great complement to our fishing heritage in Maine, or aquaculture is this competition. It's competing with our fishermen who are still out there trying to make a living. I've seen both, so it's really complex and really hard to tease out. The one last thing I would say is a lot of times what comes to this dialogue, too, is ideas of naturalness. So is aquaculture natural? And that often plays into that agriculture, terrestrial agriculture comparison. 1s Agriculture, by definition is not natural, but people you know, it's like selecting for particular traits, but people will often see it as such. So that's a very fraught 1s kind of comparison, too.

Corinne

Yeah. 1s So I'm looking at my outline here and I think I want to skip ahead a little bit because this is making me think of a lot of similar things that I heard when I was looking at public perceptions of finfish Aquaculture in grad school. And 1s I think strategic messaging is a huge influence here. And 1s I don't know how people are thinking about what these farms look like. For example, I think not a lot of people can picture what an oyster farm or a fish farm or something looks like. And so that's that jump to terrestrial agriculture where we're thinking maybe like a bunch of chickens all cooped up together, which then translates to maybe not the most positive image. So in your experience, what sort of messaging do you think is the most effective in getting people to really understand Aquaculture and not even saying get on board and like Aquaculture, but just like being the most effective? I want to say, in my opinion, visual parents and personal anecdotal stories maybe?

Laura

Yeah, I mean, your sense is correct. 2s The first thing I would say is often there's not time or funding for this, but pretesting of any kind of strategic messaging strategy is critical. And I think what often happens is. 1s You know, organizations or universities or whoever it is that that want to take part in this kind of messaging, they have the best intentions. And so not trying to, you know, throw them under the bus here by any means, but, you know, doing something like rolling out a campaign where you want to talk about Aquaculture and hopefully down the road change attitudes and possibly behaviors, I mean, that is that is a strategy that needs to be planned and ideally pretested. Bring in some folks, think about how do you want to frame this message? 2s Who are your target audiences, things like that. So that's just a comment up front, is that often we have a limited budget. And so we think, okay, let's just put it all into making these beautiful YouTube videos or pamphlets or whatever it is. But if we took a little bit of that and did some planning beforehand or evaluation afterwards too, I think that would go a long way. But in terms of what works in messaging, 1s I think sort of drawing on a variety of different studies we've done and what we've seen in the literature, personal relevance is key. So again, just 1s making things seem like you should care can go a long way. And this sounds like a no brainer, but for something like Aquaculture, if you don't live in a place where it's very obvious, 2s why should you care about it? And so maybe this is a lower bar in places like Maine, but even, like we were joking earlier, Arista County, I mean, I don't know, that might not be top of mind for some of those residents. So how can you make this topic interesting and relevant to folks you might talk to? The other thing we've played around a lot with is telling stories. Again, this may come as sort of a no brainer, but there's actually some really interesting 1s media psychology work around. What does it take to become invested in a story such that you are what's called transported? So in this case, transportation, meaning. 1s It's like the feeling when you're so in a story that you're outside of yourself, you're in that narrative world and you're so invested in what's going to happen that you might even momentarily forget that you're sitting in a room in Bangor, Maine and all of a sudden you're wherever the storyteller is. And it turns out that that feeling, if you can evoke it, which sometimes it's hard, but if you can evoke that people can. 1s You're much more likely to change people's attitudes. You're much more likely to affect their emotions positive and negative, and then those subsequently can then change behaviors down the road.

Corinne

I mean, to your point, I remember 1s people caring a lot less about 1s facts being thrown in their face about, hey, this is, I don't know, like scientific facts, and more so about stories and being invested. And something I remember is that a lot of people seem to be really interested in trust from the actual farmers and the people that were growing the food that they were going to be consuming. And hearing from them and hearing their stories was so much more important than a graph that shows I don't even know, like feed conversion ratios or something like that. That's fine, but that's not really what they were interested in. And also at Main Aquaculture Association, they have these really great videos that are stories of farmers out on the water and really you're personally invested in them and it sort of transports you for a second and brings more of a personal meaning to Aquaculture.

Laura

Yeah, I mean, I think we have a lot of evidence now to suggest that the quote unquote objective knowledge. So, like the facts, like feed conversion ratio, they don't really contribute that much to people's actual attitudes toward Aquaculture almost not at all. And I think that's hard for some folks to swallow because there's a really long standing assumption that is sort of this deficit model type approach. In other words, we've got these folks out there, they don't know anything about Aquaculture. We just got to crack their heads open, fill them up with some facts, and then they'll be good to go. And obviously that's very simplistic and I don't think anyone really believes that, but we sometimes fall back on that operating assumption and turns out, yeah, it's not that at all.

Corinne

Yeah. And and I also think that you were saying this about, like, making things relevant to whatever, whoever your audience is joking about. Arousic. Is that how we say it? Aroustic. Aroustic. Forgive me, I've only been here since September, but, like, making it relevant and getting people to care beyond just like, I don't know, for example, Belfast. Like, where a facility is being placed. Like I'm thinking about. I grew up in Colorado for the first 18 years of my life, and aquaculture is not super relevant there, obviously, but making that relevant, if that means, hey, I can get cheaper salmon at the grocery store instead of having to have wild caught salmon flown in from Alaska or Washington, which is great, don't get me wrong. Great salmon. But I'm going to be paying more for that. So if that's how it's relevant, then great. Or if it's like, creating jobs or talking about environmental sustainability, depending on people's place based values, I think that's super important to acknowledge as well.

Laura

Yeah. And the perceived benefits thing, that's been a really important factor in all this work we've done that seems to really resonate with people. Rather than 1s talking about, oh, there's minimal risks, let's talk about the benefits. And as you suggest, it may be focusing on different things for different people, but whether it's the economic, the jobs, 1s or reducing the price of protein yeah, that's been exceedingly important can at the time.

Corinne

Here, I want to ask just a few more questions. One do you have any more fun studies or papers coming down the pipeline?

Laura

Yeah. So one that I'm pretty excited about, 1s we just wrapped it up, but we're hoping to get it published soon. Has to do with what I'm sure people in this area at least have been paying attention to, with the development of land based rafts in Belfast, but also in Bucksport. And we look at a facility in California, northern California as well. And in this study, we interviewed people. So we interviewed over 70 people, actually. So everyone from people who live in these communities to people who are associated with the corporations that are trying to cite these facilities, to local lawmakers and so on. And what we wanted to get at in particular is conceptions of justice. So how does justice relate to how people are thinking about these facilities? 1s And the thing with justice is it has many dimensions. As social scientists, we like to really pull things apart as much as we can. I don't know, maybe you think that's only a biologist or something, but social scientists are really good at it. So justice, we can divide it into things like interpersonal justice. How are we treated? It could be procedural justice. How are the procedures like a public meeting drawn out? So there are different dimensions of justice. And what we were trying to look at is how do people think these various dimensions are being met or being violated with respect to these sightings of these Rasp facilities? And what we found was pretty interesting. 1s We look at Belfast, for instance, where we know that there's been quite a bit of controversy and some pretty loud voices opposing it, and we see there the lowest how we measured it, the lowest social license to operate, so, in other words, the highest opposition to the project. And we also see some pretty clear perceived violations of justice. And I think. 1s I'm hoping this kind of study is useful not just for our academic E types, but also to suggest, hey, here are the ways that folks we talked to thought that they felt that there were these clear violations of what should be expected. Maybe they, for instance, felt they were included in the process too late or that there were some interpersonal dimensions they weren't treated being treated fairly. So hopefully this has not just theoretical but real practical implications.

Corinne

Yeah, that sounds super interesting and that sounds like it could be a whole podcast episode on its own, which we just might have to do. And so my last question for you. I'm curious since you mentioned at the very beginning that your background is not in Aquaculture and you started sort of came into Aquaculture through this job at Humane. So have you noticed within yourself how your perceptions of Aquaculture have changed since starting this job up until now?

Laura

Yeah, it's a great question. I think I have. 2s Continued to be skeptical, but skeptical in a positive way. I mean, I think we think of skeptical and, oh, you know, that's a that's a negative thing. I think I am continually learning about Aquaculture, and it is fascinating, and I think there's so much promise and there's so many types I didn't know about. And, you know, I I think I had a very sort of narrow conception of Aquaculture equals salmon in net pens in the ocean before taking this job, and now it's like that is one teeny, tiny little sliver of it. And so I try to, in fact, reflect on that quite a bit, because I think probably most folks that I'm studying also have that conception. And so trying to think about how do we get from maybe a more, I don't know, impoverished version of what Aquaculture is to trying to sort of expand it for folks would be, I think, a great way to maybe change attitudes and perceptions.

Corinne

Yeah. And I don't think skeptical is a bad place to be at. I think that means 1s open to information and learning and also not just taking in every single thing as it comes at face value without critically thinking about it

Laura

That sounds better. I like that.

Corinne

Yeah. Not a bad thing. Great. Is there any last minute things you just have to have to get out there?

Laura

I don't think so. Thanks for having me. Amazing.

Corinne

Yeah. Thank you for taking time to record today.