Over the years, there has been a great number of surveys to try to find out what impression the popular science images of scientists give to children and young people. For several decades, Draw a Scientist Tests (DAST) have been carried out in many countries, where young people are asked to draw a scientist. The test is designed to detect stereotypes and shows that young people’s drawings often match most clichés about scientists.
In 2007, the Swedish non-profit association Public and Science (VA) studied young people’s ideas about scientists.
“That was 17 years ago, and a lot has happened in the media since then,” says former VA research officer Karin Hermansson, who is now CEO of the research institute Ifous.
“But at the same time, I think that if you asked children to draw a scientist today, it would look roughly the same as it did back then.”
Karin Hermansson
CEO of the research institute Ifous
“In our survey,” she continues, “we came to the conclusion that there are very stereotypical images of scientists and researchers in media aimed at children and young people. There is a lot of natural science and medicine, lab coats, microscopes and experiments. Researchers in other subjects are generally less visible, and this probably does not only apply to children and young people.”
Because popular culture is full of the strangest ”scientists”. English Wikipedia’s list of fictional scientists and engineers runs to 20 printed pages.
A typical representative of the absent-minded scientist archetype is Professor Calculus from the Tintin comic books. Often these characters are more inventors than scientists, like Donald Duck’s friend Gyro Gearloose and our own Swedish cartoon figure Skalman, or Q in the James Bond films. This sort of scientist does its best to find good solutions, but as every assiduous consumer of popular culture knows, things often don’t go as planned and their experiments fail miserably.
The next archetype is the evil genius and psychopath. There is a long tradition here, from Dr. Frankenstein through Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to countless evil characters in movies and in comic books. We have the nuclear scientist Dr. No in the 1962 James Bond film of the same name. We have Dr. Strangelove, the nuclear scientist and ex-Nazi played by Peter Sellers.
Then there is Doctor Octopus from the Spider-Man comics, who started out as a brilliant and respected nuclear physicist, atomic research consultant, inventor and lecturer. And we have a modern Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the Hulk, who has seven(!) doctorates. Following an accident in his research, whenever he is wronged, he turns into a green giant who goes berserk.
But there is also Indiana Jones, an adventurer modelled on countless other adventurers on film. But learning has been added in his case. He is a professor of archaeology, and when we first meet him, he is lecturing in a suit and glasses, before he puts on his fedora hat and leather jacket, grabs his bullwhip and sets off on an adventure. Clearly inspired by Indiana Jones, Dan Brown’s hero Robert Langdon, a professor of religious symbolism, is described in one book as ”Harrison Ford in Harris Tweed”.
A recurrent criticism of popular culture’s image of scientists is that they are men. This was challenged in another VA report from 2017, where both girls and boys were asked to draw themselves as researchers. Professor Anne-Li Lindgren and senior lecturer Sofia Grunditz at Stockholm University have analysed the results.
They want to show that children take in many things that are not stereotypes. They highlight examples that contradict the stereotypes by having pupils draw a scientist who is also a cool guy, for example, or a pretty girl, or draw not only a scientist in a white coat but also researchers in a meeting room or discussing archaeological discoveries.
“Stereotypes are perhaps found primarily in popular culture and not among children,” says Lindgren.
Anne-Li Lindgren
Professor at Stockholm University
She also believes that perceptions are changing. A good example is the TV series The Big Bang Theory. “In that series, the geek has been completely reimagined. There is now a great deal of research on the nerd as a new type of hero. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be a geek.”
Furthermore, the proportion of female researchers in popular culture has increased considerably. “Above all in forensics in various crime series, where the protagonists are really strong female characters who are incredibly driven scientists. There have been a number of such TV series in recent years, such as Silent Witness and Bones. We also see researchers who are social scientists, criminologists and more,” says Sofia Grunditz.
Sofia Grunditz
Senior lecturer at Stockholm University
Things have also changed over a longer period of time. A meta-study of DAST tests from the 1960s onwards shows that in the years 1966–1977, only one per cent of girls drew a female scientist. In 1985, that had risen to 33 per cent, and in 2016 it was 58 per cent. In the same year, almost nine out of ten boys drew a male scientist.
“So it is important not to let ourselves be deceived by old stereotypes. I think we get new ones all the time,” says Grunditz.
One example of standard perceptions changing, and also varying, is that researchers in popular culture are usually nowhere near a university, very far removed from the everyday work of administration and test marking.
At the same time, there are also many films set in boarding schools or on campuses, which have their own power structures.
“Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books and films is an extremely good example,” says Gunnar Krantz, a professor of visual communication at Malmö University. “I think that it leads a lot of young people to see their future university studies as being part of a larger community, where there are clever people who you can learn a lot from in a fantastic environment.”
Gunnar Kratz
Professor of visual communication at Malmö University
But the clichéd notions still live on. If you were to ask any adult how they imagine a researcher in fiction, the answer would probably be a natural scientist in a white lab coat. But Universitetsläraren’s interviewees seem unperturbed by the persistence of these stereotypes.
Robert Aman, an expert on comics and graphic novels and an associate professor of pedagogy at Linköping University, says “I don’t believe in the behaviourist idea that you imitate or copy behaviour based on what you read.” He believes that popular culture’s exaggerated and unrealistic images of scientists are mostly a dramaturgical device.
Robert Aman
An expert on comics and graphic novels and an associate professor of pedagogy at Linköping University
“It wouldn’t add the same flavour if I were to be included in a comic, for example. I don’t have a white lab coat. I wear a shabby cardigan and spend a lot of my working day answering emails. Try writing something dramatic about that!”
