Diverse Intelligences on Display: Museum visitors reconsider intelligence through animal minds

Description

Museums play an integral role in promoting science education worldwide, enabling visitors to informally engage with scientific topics past and present. Understanding Diverse Intelligences is a promising topic for museum exhibitions due to its accessibility and attractiveness to visitors. However, few exhibitions have addressed this theme, with even fewer having evaluated different ways of displaying such research. To address this, we conducted a comprehensive impact evaluation on the exhibition ‘What makes us human?’, which used positive framing to encourage visitors to re-think uniqueness of human intelligence and reconsider humanity’s relationship with other species. Using a range of evaluation methods, we assessed visitors’ engagement with the exhibition, and their subsequent changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour. We found evidence of positive short-term impact with visitors reporting increased knowledge of the exhibition’s content, attitude changes, and intent to make conscious behavioural changes. Our study shows that Diverse Intelligences can be successfully displayed in museum settings and highlights the impact potential of positively framed bioscience exhibitions on the public.

Period	18 Jul 2025 → 20 Jul 2025
Event title	Diverse Intelligences Summit
Event type	Conference
Location	St Andrews, United KingdomShow on map