Disclaimer: This is an automated transcript, we apologize for any errors. If you notice any problems, please email the show at teachmeaboutthegreatlakes@gmail.com. Thank you.

Stuart Carlton 0:00
Hey there listeners, this is Stuart, we are back early with a special episode this month, from time to time, we have a chance to talk to people are doing really great research around the Great Lakes and we want to present those to you and something new, we're calling researcher features. And these will be periodic interviews that we do on no particular set schedule, and will release them when they're ready, which sometimes will be right away, sometimes it'll be a little bit down the road, just depending on how everybody's schedule goes. And so this is the first of those researcher features. And I'm really glad to feature Xiao Ma, who's one of my colleagues here in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue. And I first met Joe actually, it's kind of a funny story. Well, sort of funny. I started at Purdue in 2013, as a postdoctoral researcher, and at the time I applied for that postdoc job, I also applied for a faculty position in the department, forestry, natural resources. And so I showed up on campus after applying for the faculty position, while after I'd gotten the postdoc position, and the very first thing my mentor did was said, alright, we need to talk to her. And so I sat down in her office, and she said, Well, I've got bad news for you, you didn't get the faculty job. And for those of you who are not in academia, maybe you make good life choices, or you want a steady job that doesn't involve moving across the country, or maybe you value your free time. Well, for whatever reason, those of you who are not in academia, that's not surprising academic jobs are few and far between, and they're very hard to get. And so I was not super upset. Anyway, went about my business. And then a few weeks later, the interviews for this job for the academic job for the faculty job started. And one of the people who came in was Xiao Ma. And so I'm nobody at Purdue. I'm a postdoctoral researcher, which is, you know, in the grand scheme of things, absolutely nothing. And Zhao was walking around campus, and she opened up the door to the library or, and she said, Oh, you must be stored, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I'm so interested in hearing about, you know, whatever research I was doing, or something like that. And so that meant that not only had Jow, done research to know who I was, and what it looked like and what I did, but she had sort of committed it to memory. And I again, was absolutely nobody. And so the fact that she did that work with me gives you an idea about the type of intellect and preparation that Zhao Chao does, it'll actually has in that type of preparation that she does. So anyway, I'm a big fan of her. She's extraordinarily intelligent, hardworking, smart, really nice, too. And so we're glad to feature her social scientist and our very first researcher feature. Now, before we get going, I also want to let you know, we recently did a story, you can go see it in the AI SG newsroom, the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant newsroom that is that I see grant.org Or look for a link in the show notes. And we just did a story about Chow and the research that she had done. And I think that's worth reading, in addition to listening to this podcast, and so I encourage you to check that out. And with that, let's kick in well, we have a new theme songs for the researcher feature. So we're going to kick in the researcher feature theme song, and then we'll go straight into the episode and since we weren't sure when we're going to release this, you'll hear Carolyn and I talk a little bit about what episode this is. That's all wrong. That's not the right episode number. I will talk about where to go see the show notes. That's not right, either. Just go to teach me about the great lakes.com and and look for this episode or just look down to your podcast player and you can see show notes there. So other than all of the wrong stuff that you're about to hear, I think the interview with your hours really right so let's go ahead and kick off the interview.

Researcher, a feature rich researcher teaches about third grade Welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes a podcast in which I get people who are smarter and harder working than I am to teach me about the Great Lakes. My name is Stuart Carlton and I work with Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant and I know a lot about the increasingly common playoff failures of the New Orleans Saints. But I do not know a lot about the Great Lakes. I'm joined as always today by Carolyn Foley Illinois, Indiana secrets Research Coordinator. Carolyn, what's up?

Carolyn Foley 4:20
Not much, Stuart, what's up with you?

Stuart Carlton 4:23
Also not much. That is a conversation starter. I've already seen one. And we will move on from that too. Did you have a nice weekend. But anyway, great. I'm doing great. I'm super excited to be here. And this this month we're going to do a little different. We're going to focus on some cool research is going on around the Great Lakes. One of the great things about our job is that we get to work with people who are just doing fascinating seeing

Carolyn Foley 4:47
all sorts of really cool questions and trying to get answers and generating new questions sharing their information. It's really great.

Stuart Carlton 4:53
Yeah, it is really great. And one thing I like about it a lot is it's not you know there's a theoretical component but it's not you know, super theoretical Only there's research trying to get answers to questions that can help people make a difference in their everyday life.

Carolyn Foley 5:04
So this month we're bringing in Zhao Ma. She's a researcher at Purdue University. She's a social scientist. And we'll hear some more from her right now.

Stuart Carlton 5:11
Due to due to

Carolyn Foley 5:19
some Hi there. Today we are talking with each Alma and Zhao, what's your position here at Purdue University.

Dr. Zhao Ma 5:32
So I'm a social scientist and associate professor, your natural resources, social science in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue.

Carolyn Foley 5:41
Okay. And so you receive some funding to do a project that started a couple of years ago. What were you trying? What question were you trying to answer with that project?

Dr. Zhao Ma 5:53
So I was a pie off the project. But I was working with my dear friend and colleague Sarah Macmillan from agriculture and Biological Engineering Department. And we have also Linda Procopio and Bernie angle from the university as part of our team as well, so wasn't just me, right? We have a small team of researchers. And the question that was most of most interest to us is really to understand not only the biophysical potential of best management practices, in terms of reducing water pollution, to the Great Lakes, but also understanding the social acceptance of these different practices, and how the biophysical potential of the practices and social acceptance can kind of work together really give us a realistic understanding of how much we can rely on best management practices to actually achieve water, water pollution reduction goals.

Stuart Carlton 6:51
So hold on one second, I'm sorry, can you help me understand best management practices? And what those are? So those are things that different landowners can do? Is that right?

Dr. Zhao Ma 6:58
Right. So best management practices, best management of water quality, related issues, right, and practices, individuals or groups or entity private businesses can adopt and implement on the landscape, right? So from a household individual perspective, we can all get a ring bearer, all right, for example, we can choose to to reduce application of fertilizers are private law, right? From a business perspective or entity, like a church or like a school, right? They can also do these kind of things, right? individual households can do but they can also put in a larger scale growing infrastructure such as the retention pound, or some other ways, right to reduce water pollution. So all of these are kind of categorized as best management practices,

Carolyn Foley 7:51
right? Or like a green roof or something like

Dr. Zhao Ma 7:54
that. Okay, there's so many varieties, right? So if you're a farmer, then you might want to think about like, no tillage will be a best management practice, right?

Carolyn Foley 8:04
And so where were you working to try to understand what practices were being put in place and how they might affect water quality.

Dr. Zhao Ma 8:13
So the two watersheds we were touching out was the East Branch lateral Calumet River, and the Trail Creek watersheds, both in Northwestern Indiana, but for the social science, research components, right, we would have to have a kind of more political boundaries, right, rather than using watersheds. So we're working in Porter and that poor County.

Carolyn Foley 8:37
And that's kind of a tricky thing when you're thinking about because a watershed does not follow political boundaries all the time. And so there may be things happening or you know, even state boundaries or international boundaries, right. And

Dr. Zhao Ma 8:51
that was the first challenge actually, for our project. Because my my KPI, Sarah McMillan, she's, she was in charge of the modeling component understanding about physical potential of the the BMPs best management practices. So she uses watershed boundaries, right? But for me, in order to talk to residents and farmers and be able to like survey people, I need the sampling frame, and you can't really get that as a watershed scale. Right? So you have to look at what counties said within that watershed and you'll use county boundaries right? And then of course, they don't always line up so that's challenge number one.

Carolyn Foley 9:29
Well, okay, so we talked about what question you set out to answer do you think you answered it? Um,

Dr. Zhao Ma 9:38
I will say we did to a great extent but not everything right. So as a part of the process, we actually discovered more questions. There are certain things were wanting and thinking there might be what was happening and you know, some of them we were able to confirm right our hypothesis our pretty, you know, conceived notion about what's going on the landscape. But we also discovered a new things that we didn't really know why, right. So I suppose some follow up research will be really helpful. And then the modeling component we did as much as we could. But the little bit at the end, we couldn't completely finish with the rest of the project due to data availability. And that's another challenge that until you'll jump into the project, start to look at what water water quality data there is available at what scale and how different sources of data can talk to each other, each other, you wouldn't really know what could be done completely. Right. So that's a little piece of we're still kind of left behind there.

Carolyn Foley 10:41
So what what are the different sources of data that you're talking about here? So to get information from the residents, you did, what type of data collection? So we did

Dr. Zhao Ma 10:51
a number of qualitative interviews, kind of like a conversation we're having here, right? So we have some pre drafted questions, asking people about their perceptions of water pollution issues, their concerns, their interest in adopting some of these best management practices, right. And if they notice their neighbors, or other people in their vicinities, are doing something similar, right. So we have a lot of data kind of conversational questions that really help us getting a better understanding of where people are in terms of what they're thinking and what they're doing. And that was really helpful to inform the development of a survey instrument that we send out to 1000s of residents later, right. So we couldn't have a two hour long conversation with every individual. So what probably had I if I remember correctly, 12 to 15 interviews, and then that led to a survey at a much larger scale. So that's the from the social sciences side, right? The primary data are these two sources, we also had the census data, because that was very helpful to understand neighborhood structure composition. So we used a lot of the census, US census data. And on the water quality side, we had a we use a lot of EPA data and USGS data trying to understand the NN P and sediment content in the water,

Stuart Carlton 12:13
what kind of P in the sediment,

Dr. Zhao Ma 12:15
nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment? Three things are, we're looking at

Carolyn Foley 12:20
those contaminants that are getting into the water around the land, and potentially go either toward the lake or down toward like the Mississippi River. So the data that you were mentioning, the census data, the USGS data, the EPA data, are those all publicly available data that you were

Dr. Zhao Ma 12:42
so they they are publicly available? Right. But you kind of need to know where to find them is not, you know, if not everything organizing in the clearing house, you can just go and have all the water data from these two counties, right, downloaded at the right scale. Right. So we have to do some digging, and Sara McMann. And student Jonathan mills. And, and, Rachel, we're kind of in charge of that process. Right. So I know they spend a lot of time trying to figure out what are the right data sets we could use at the right scale, right. And then the census data actually was pretty easy to use, you just go and download them.

Carolyn Foley 13:22
Right. Okay. And so, you mentioned grad students, how many grad students worked on this project with you?

Dr. Zhao Ma 13:29
So as a team, we had three grad students. So there was one student Jen, Jennifer, Dominic was a social science student, she completed her master's degree actually based on this project. And I have a two AB student ag biological engineering student. Rachel is a current PhD student, and she helped for the first year as part of the her research experience, and then transition to Jonathan Jonathan Mills, who is a master student, he is a finishing this semester. So by the end of the semester, hopefully, I can tell you exactly what's happening. For that for the modeling component

Carolyn Foley 14:08
in terms of which of the practices will do the best that we get back, we will stay tuned. Yeah, so but let's talk a little bit more about the graduate students. So how so this is one graduate student who's working with you to graduate to students who are working with your co investigator? Yes. How many graduate students total do you have in your lab at any one time?

Dr. Zhao Ma 14:31
Um, it fluctuates quite a bit, right. So some years have a smaller lab and maybe three grad students, right. Last year was a particularly exciting and chaotic year. I think we had a total of 13 people you my lab, I want to say nine we're glad students you know, PhD and Master's students. So that was a was the exception Not a larger year, right? But on average, I would say, five, six students, it really kind of vary from year to year.

Carolyn Foley 15:07
And are these students basically all supported by money that you've brought in through a grant to work on a specific project or a time period?

Dr. Zhao Ma 15:15
Mostly? Right. So our lab has been really fortunate. We got support from work innovation, like the Indiana Illinois sea grant from the National Science Foundation from USDA, US Department of Agriculture, from US State Department work abroad. In some cases and other foundations. The Forest Service is a big, big funder of my my lab research as well. Right. So most of the students are funded by external grants. But we're also very fortunate in this department, there are some departmental assistantship. So sometimes I have been able to kind of put together different resources to fund students,

Carolyn Foley 15:58
right. So it's kind of like a puzzle piece. On how to support the students while they're,

Dr. Zhao Ma 16:03
you get asked, and that's becoming more and more important, again, our night off work, because, honestly, you know, the the amount of research funding available to researchers is kind of decreasing each year. At least that's my personal perception, right? Especially for social science work, right? So we're really our ability to get like, you know, a million dollar grant to just support what we want to do. It's, it's quite limited, right? So our ability to pull together and convince different donors and different funders to pull together resources to support a project. That's really, really important,

Carolyn Foley 16:40
right? And you're asking questions that can actually affect people's lives potentially, like if you want to reduce water, improve the water quality,

Dr. Zhao Ma 16:50
exactly. So you can see an issue like that could potentially attract interest from multiple agencies and multiple entities and organizations.

Stuart Carlton 16:58
You got to cobble it together. And then from the organizational standpoint, so as people who fund researchers, you kind of have to be willing to share the results and the glory and things like that. It's fights over logos. It's usually fights overload. But yeah. But But recognizing, I think it takes a certain organizational humility, which should be easy to have, but not all organizations

Dr. Zhao Ma 17:25
have it. Right. And also just, you know, partly depends on the researcher team, right? It's, I think, over time, we are trained, in terms of our mindset, too, right? To really be conscious, acknowledging the people organizations supported us, right, whether through direct funding or through other human kind support. And that's really important, and you need to recognize the people's help. So they could also go back to their agency and then potentially obtain more more support. Right. So it's really just, you know, doing kind of the basics,

Carolyn Foley 17:57
right. In terms of the research that we were talking about when we started, what was the most surprising thing to you about your research findings, particularly on the social science side?

Dr. Zhao Ma 18:08
Um, I wouldn't say surprising, but I would say most exciting if we went in thinking that information, which many different conservation organizations and Resource Management Agency really kind of focus on delivering information disseminating information among stakeholders, right. So there is this notion that lack of information or lack of lack of knowledge is really the core of many environmental problems only as people know, they would choose to do the right thing, right. And that will just address a lot of the problems we have. We have previous theories and studies kind of allow us to hypothesize, right, the role of information may be limited, but we have never tested in this particular context in terms of a BMP adoption to reduce water pollution, right, in this kind of Maotai group, residential, agricultural industrial landscape. Right. So we went here hoping to be able to say something about the role of information, and we were able to say something about that, right, it turned out we were right, which is always great. The role of information was quite limited, right? So if you think about different resident rather than living in this landscape, some people already had a previous you know, have positive attitudes towards adopting BMP than reducing water pollutions. And there are people on the more negative side and then you have this whole lump of people sort of in the middle. So once we did our information, experiment with the the people will realize information really does not change too much of the attitudes on the two extreme ends, right. So the only thing we could hope is maybe information could steer some thinking and some interest in this middle group, right. So what we found is, if people were already negative information, giving them more information about why this issue is important, only makes them more negative. If people were already positive, you'll give them more information. They reconfirm the idea. Yes, we do want to adopt. And we do want to support this, right? And it doesn't do too much to the people in the middle. And you're sort of, you know, overall, you don't see a very significant effect of giving people in front.

Stuart Carlton 20:25
So hold on, we're in that by me again. So you gave people different amounts of information about a best management practice about say, I don't know, rain barrels was that one, or we gave people two

Dr. Zhao Ma 20:35
types of information? Well, actually, our our experiment has three components, right? So when, well, I guess three branches, right? One is we're just giving people no information, we just did a kind of pre survey and post survey.

Stuart Carlton 20:48
So it's kind of a control condition. No, no, no intervention condition.

Dr. Zhao Ma 20:52
Exactly. And the second branch is a treatment. And we give people very generic information we tell them about, you know, water pollution, generally, is the issue. And here are some things you can do. But we talked about in a very generic term, we didn't give them any information about the specific watersheds, they're leaving in. And then you know, the type of pollution there are and a specific thing they could do. But it's just kind of, we're trying to mimicking the general fliers, very often we see some variety of organizations, right. And the third branch of the experiment is a very specific information that we got to find our modeling component, we know exactly what pollution present in the watershed we're interested. And then where the sources of the pollution, whether from agriculture, or residential or whatever, right, industrial, and then what specific things that people could do, right. So our hope is to see the row of information in general, but also be able to tell a little bit about this generic information versus a more tailored information, which one works better.

Stuart Carlton 22:04
And so even with a tailored information, you found that there wasn't a stronger factor?

Dr. Zhao Ma 22:08
No, no, the tailor was a little bit better than the generic information. But the generic information really just have no,

Stuart Carlton 22:16
it's the information itself was just about like the water conditions and how you might say it, was it just like dry information about water quality and protecting water quality? or were there other aspects in there like looking at, like normative influences or something?

Dr. Zhao Ma 22:34
No, with just dry information?

Stuart Carlton 22:36
That's interesting. Yeah. And as you know, I've done a lot of research on climate attitudes and adaptations and things like that. And we find that same story over and over again, that you're giving people information doesn't magically make them better people. You get to a better person, but everybody else?

Dr. Zhao Ma 22:52
No, but that's important, right? Because even though we know, the information is important, absolutely right. It's necessary but not sufficient in terms of changing behavior, changing attitudes and behavior, right. So for us, that was a very important finding. It's not to say we are against distributing important information to people, but we're just saying that's alone. That alone is not going to cause effect that we were hoping to see.

Carolyn Foley 23:21
There's a story about your research project, the entire research project that was recently written by I mean, miles of Illinois-Indiana, Sea Grant, and people can find the link to that in the show notes. So Joe, is there anything else you'd like to tell us about your research project? Some? Any other really important findings that you think came out of it? Or are you would you rather wait until you have those final results? Well,

Dr. Zhao Ma 23:44
I guess there was maybe two more little things that, you know, might be interesting to share with your listeners, right. One is, what we found is people really always think the pollution is caused by somebody else. Right. So it was very interesting when we surveyed urban rather than suburban residents, rural residents versus small, medium scale farmers and large scale farmers, right. These are the five groups of residents in the watersheds, we were particularly targeting for our work. The urban residents tend to think of the water pollution more coming from crop production, right. And then, of course, then urban residents and suburban residents also think a lot of pollution come from septic tanks used by rural residents who are not in the farming category, right. And the farmers are saying actually, a lot of the pollution to come from urban long fertilizer, Snowplow to salt, that sort of things, right. So there's a little bit of people tend to think other residential groups contribution to the water pollution problem is larger than in their own right where it's large. or proportionally in terms of the actual, the actual sources? Right. So that was something quite interesting. I think it's part of human nature, right? We tend to think it's somebody else's problem, right. But it is very nice to be able to see it with concrete data. That's indeed the case. Right. The second thing I would like to share briefly is actually stored mentioned that earlier in terms of the power of social influence, right, that is really something we're noticing our study how important it is that people are influenced by their peers, by people they consider as their peers, maybe their families, their friends, other landowners or their neighbors that they could they interact with on a regular basis. So all these appears actually have a very strong persuasion power on individual behavior, right? So what we see as the people who value more about their pure opinion, opinions, right, or if they have observed more what their peers have done, they're more likely to adopt similar practices. Right.

Stuart Carlton 26:05
So that suggests we made this up. But that suggests an outreach strategy, right. So you give people information on conditions on water quality conditions, and things that you do without including any normative info and without any peer influence information in there. But so maybe the information that drives action is information about what the sources of pollution are, and what homeowners like you or landowners, like you are doing to prevent it. So that's, that's phase two, which we should find funding for. Mostly said find funding, not provide funding. But it's just that it's like, alright, so But let's, let's, let's make this problem personal, right, it's very easy to other away all of your problems. You don't say, Oh, this is other people are causing this. I mean, I noticed that in my dissertation work on the net band in Florida, you know, and again, my band in 1994, he saw that same thing of the ring away the problem, because I think that's an important defense mechanism, frankly. But but but, but so I wonder if we personalize the problem and work on an outreach strategy based on that or an information provision strategy based on that? I wonder if that's more likely to influence attitudes and behaviors?

Dr. Zhao Ma 27:13
I do think that that's very important, right? I mean, this is not anything new, right? In fact, this kind of using normative influence to persuade conservation behavior has been used in energy energy sector, right? So if you you, I remember getting energy bill saying, Oh, your neighborhood, average energy consumption is as a right and yours is B, right. So when I'm like, above a, that really makes me feel very bad. And I'm gonna do something next month to reduce my energy usage. So similar things I imagine can be done in terms of water pollution, but we also need to be careful, right? And because, you know, norm is very powerful. But it is also quite a specific, right? There are different types of norms and norms we call descriptive norms, things you can see what other people do. And in our study, that actually is a more powerful aspect of the norm, right? People actually respond to descriptive norm, what do they observe their neighbors are doing what they observe, other than owners are doing with their house or with your field that seemed to have a stronger influence? In our study, right. And then there's the as another type of normal college. We call it subjective norm, right. That is more what you think other people believe you should be doing. Right? So it's a little bit more convoluted. And in some conservation cases, that is a stronger motivation, right. But yeah, in our studies, specific study, we found it less important than the descriptive norm, right. But descriptive norm is something that, you know, you can try to create it through information through messaging, but it's also something people have to go out and be able to see in their neighborhood where on their landscape, right, so I imagine some kind of demonstration projects or things that's more visible in this particular case might be helpful, or at least it can be used in, in addition to the message.

Carolyn Foley 29:14
For example, I see some, some rain gardens around going on a walk and I see oh, this is a rain garden. There's a sign and it's in my neighborhood.

Dr. Zhao Ma 29:24
Yeah, and I know Dr. Linda Procopio was supported by Indiana Illinois fee grand before where she has projects basically, doing that right giving people not just the ring bearer, but also giving giving them the signage, right,

Stuart Carlton 29:37
but it can also be kind of pernicious. You know, those descriptive norms. I think about that a lot because Indiana, generally in West Lafayette, specifically, there's like a ton of litter. We're one of the states with the most litter of any state. And I think the reason for that is the unbelievable amount of wind we have here and you see this litter everywhere and that that forms its own descriptive norm right where people like Oh, It's okay to litter and so it becomes sort of self fulfilling in that way. Right? Right. So I think that's yes, I think about that specifically all of the time when I see the just unbelievable amount of like fast food wrappers. And you know, tires.

Dr. Zhao Ma 30:13
Right, exactly. So that actually, you know, if earlier on, you're asking me, right, is there anything surprising? We found a word? Did I get to answer all the questions, right? We were planned before the project started. That's actually one thing we would really like to do in the future is two things. descriptive norm, it's so powerful, right? Like the people's ability to see what's happening in their in their surroundings. But we want to know, where is the tipping point of that? Right? So do you need to see 80% of your neighbors all have a ring garden in order for you to feel obliged to install ring garden? Or that 20% of the neighbor doing the same thing? Would it be enough? Right? So I think there's a lot of more fine. Kind of finer, like, finer scale questions that can be asked. Right? That would be really helpful. That would be very cool. I think so too.

Carolyn Foley 31:12
Great. So thanks, Cheryl, it was really interesting to talk with you today. Really appreciate you coming by and telling us about your research and your lab and how things work. That's really great. And I think our listeners will really appreciate it

Unknown Speaker 31:23
anytime.

Stuart Carlton 31:24
And if people want to find out more about you and the work you do you have a website, you have social media, what what kind of?

Dr. Zhao Ma 31:30
Yeah, I do, actually, I have a lab website. So if you search my name, you know, JAMA, Purdue, my website shows up and then on that there is a link to my lab as well. Right. And I also have a Twitter, I believe my Twitter handle is Jo ma underscore Purdue. Okay. All right. So that's my work, Twitter. So welcome to contact me through that, too. Before we conclude, may I just add one more thing? Certainly. I just wanted to say, all the research we do at least all the research I do in my lab, right, nothing would be possible without excellent class students. And I just have been very fortunate to have a group of very dedicated grad students. And sometimes I feel when you know, a project get reported or interview happens, right very often is with a PI. I mean, I do I did work hard on the project, but it wouldn't have been possible without my grad students. Right. And one of them is actually I mentioned Jen Dominic, after she finished the ISG project. She went on to become a full time extension specialist for the Indiana DNR. Yeah, so she's there and you know, doing the same similar type of work right, but with real people on a daily basis, right. So I do think it's very important to acknowledge that and recognize that and then also to say support like Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Well, if the reason why that happened,

Carolyn Foley 33:04
said it leads to bigger things that continue to help you that today. Great.

Dr. Zhao Ma 33:14
Thanks shall no problem anytime.

Stuart Carlton 33:18
Awesome. Now I will hit stop here

thanks a lot to chow for sharing that interesting work with us. Well, Carolyn, that's gonna do it for another round of teach me about the Great Lakes folks out there in internet land. If you want to find out more, I encourage you to visit our website at WWW dot I see grants.org Or maybe you want to follow us on Twitter you can do that also at i l i n Sea Grant. That stands for Illinois, Indiana Sea Grant. If you want to rate subscribe review of the show and so on go to the show web page at Teach Great Lakes dot transistor dot F M. Carolyn, what's something you learned about the Great Lakes today?

Carolyn Foley 34:04
What I learned about the Great Lakes is that people living in watersheds that are close to the Great Lakes tend to think that it's someone else's problem that pollution is going into the Great Lakes. I thought that was a really interesting piece to say, well, maybe my stuff isn't as bad as somebody else's. And so it was really interesting to hear Zhao talk about that. That's a thing. And to think about, how can we make that not a thing? Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 34:29
that is maybe a dozen. I thought that that was a that was a fascinating part of that discussion. And it really tied into a lot of what I've seen and I hadn't in other research and personal context. I hadn't really thought about it in a Great Lakes context. Exactly. We have one of my wife's uncle's has a lake house on cran Lake St. Mary's in Ohio, which is among the most polluted lakes there are. And every time I go there, I talk with the homeowner about the cause of the pollution, but I also talked with one of Libby's other uncle's, who is a farmer and I He likes to talk to me about the pollution too. And they both have very different ideas about the source of it. And so that really drove that home for me too. I thought that was really fascinating. And I also thought it was interesting to hear about how the different levels of information about water quality, didn't seem to make a difference, maybe on the extremes, in terms of people already knew a lot or already had strong attitudes one way or another, might have, might have made their beliefs even more extreme, but it didn't have a lot of effect on kind of the mushy middle. And, and that's not surprising, as someone who's done a fair amount of, you know, theoretical and applied social science research. I wasn't stunned to hear that. But it's still interesting in this context. And I think that it's made me think a lot about how we communicate about these issues to people as an organization,

Carolyn Foley 35:40
right, and what needs to be tacked on to the information that is important to share and how you can frame it in a way that people find it meaningful. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 35:48
I agree. And the way she said it, that information is sufficient but not necessary is a great way of thinking about that. Right? Well great. Well that wraps it up for this month. Can't wait to see you next month. Until then, keep grinding those legs PD did. Did he did