The most common stereotypes about science and scientists: what scholars know.

This book is primarily an instructional guide that addresses an often overlooked aspect in science communication: the need to break through stereotypes on scientists and science. We raised the following question: is it possible to undo the stereotypes concerning scientists and their work? It is a very relevant question because a large portion of the general public, young people, and in particular girls, has a wrong image of scientists. Scientists are considered as highly intelligent, yet socially inept individuals; excelling in the academic world, yet failing miserably in the realm of common sense; completely immerse in complicated experiments and processes and busy round the clock. The effect of this wrong image of scientists is the scarce consciousness of the relevance of science for our societies and the decreasing attractiveness towards scientific jobs for young people. For years now the European Commission is committed "to enhance public recognition of researchers and their work" through the organization of the European event called Researchers' Night. The main goal of this activity is to bring together scientists and non-scientists to facilitate the understanding of scientific results and encourage young people to embark on scientific careers. Despite the economic investment done by the European Commission and the enthusiasm of general public and researchers who participated to these events, stereotypes were not totally removed from people's mind and, if the change took place, it is short-lived. In this book we took a methodological perspective and gave tools to eliminate stereotypes on scientists and their work. We examined the most common stereotypes as: "scientists are jailed in their ivory tower of knowledge without contacts with the external reality"; " scientists do nothing but work and never have fun"; "scientists should be men, science is not for women"; "scientists are specially gifted individuals and normal people cannot understand what they do". Actions suitable to eliminate or reduce each of these stereotypes are described and the seven-years work we did through events called Light: Turn on the light on science" is illustrated. The results we obtained are analysed with special reference to Light'13, the last event we organised. We also analysed a very important aspect that is how to realize an effective interaction between scientists and non-scientists. We included a list of practical suggestions resulting from our experience for those who want to repeat what we have done and an ample list of references for the methodological aspects.