Understanding the effective mechanism of emergency science communication: from the organizational interaction perspective

During public health emergencies, effective science communication is essential for helping the public understand scientific information and adopt appropriate protective behaviours. This study develops a stochastic evolutionary game model to formalize emergency science communication as a repeated strategic interaction among the government, scientists, and the public under uncertainty. Building on bounded rationality and introducing stochastic disturbances to capture volatile emergency contexts, we derive the replication dynamics of each actor’s strategy adjustment and conduct numerical simulations to examine how coordination (or disengagement) emerges over time. The model assesses the behavioral and system-level implications of key levers—such as the perceived authority of scientific information, government responsiveness to scientific updates, government–scientist coordination efficiency, dissemination range, and the public’s risk-identification capacity—on the public’s likelihood of adopting protective guidance. Simulation results show that these factors substantially affect the public’s willingness to adopt such information and cooperate with the resultant guidance. To improve emergency science communication, the government should provide scientists with more opportunities for engagement and establish an interdepartmental coordination mechanism to enrich scientists’ research data. Meanwhile, the government should respond promptly to scientific information, thereby increasing scientists’ enthusiasm for participation through soft incentives. To form an efficient coordination with the government, scientists need to improve their professional competence and enhance the authority of scientific information. In addition, the public needs to cultivate its ability in safety risk identification to increase the enthusiasm for responding to scientific information and adopt epidemic prevention measures. The key to emergency science communication is to improve the public’s willingness to adopt scientific information and change their protective behavior according to the guidance. The research results can provide suggestions for promoting the collaborative governance and improving the effectiveness of emergency science communication.