Wissenschaftskommunikation wissenschaftlich arbeitender Psycholog_innen im deutschsprachigen Raum: Eine Bestandsaufnahme

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) expressly promotes communication from the scientific community. This corresponds to a recently published demand by the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat), which would like to see more communication from scientifically active psychologists. To promote scientific communication, however, it is first necessary to establish how and how much scientists are involved in scientific communication. This article presents a survey among scientifically active German-speaking psychologists (N = 740). The results show that German-speaking psychologists were less frequently engaged in scientific communication than researchers in other countries. The respondents stated that the main reason to engage in scientific communication was that it was fun and that they felt obligated to communicate scientific concerns to society and taxpayers. Lack of time, low prioritization, and doubts about one’s competence were the strongest inhibiting factors. More institutional support for administrative tasks and for teaching activities were the most frequently listed wishes to promote scientific communication. In the Discussion section, we put these findings in context with prior international surveys and consider means of promoting scientific communication.