Public Attitudes Toward Nanotechnology

Citizens form attitudes and policy judgments even in the absence of an in-depth understanding of new technology. In fact, as nanotechnology has emerged in mainstream media and policy debates, many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and policy makers have expressed concerns regarding the ethics, regulation, and funding of nanotechnology research. This [Page 634]raises the question of how public attitudes about nanotechnology are formed as a function of what people know, what their personal value systems are, and how the issue is being portrayed in mass media.

First, attitudes may be shaped by how well an individual understands nanotechnology. This argument is based on the assumption that the more knowledgeable a person is regarding nanotechnology topics, the more accurately he or she will be able to assess the potential risks and benefits of nanotechnology and to translate these assessments into meaningful attitudes. Results from studies trying to link levels of information about emerging technologies to more positive attitudes, however, have been mixed at best, suggesting that this relationship is contingent upon a number of audience characteristics, and how information about the issue is presented in mass media.

Research dealing with the impact of audience characteristics on attitudes toward nanotechnology has identified at least three predispositional factors that are related to how citizens think about the new technology. Research on worldviews and value hierarchies suggests that the public's judgment about the relative risks of nanotechnology depends heavily on people's preexisting value systems and the interaction of those value systems with affective or emotional reactions that people have to the technology. A second important predispositional factor is people's willingness to defer the decision making about emerging technologies to trained experts (often termed deference to scientific authority) when faced with complex scientific problems. Finally, religious and moral concerns about “unnatural” technologies have been shown to undermine public support of nanotechnology, and to influence how lay audiences process new information about nanotechnology.

In spite of the impacts that predispositional factors can have on public opinion, public attitudes toward nanotechnology in the United States overall continue to be generally positive. This has been attributed to the nature of media coverage that—up to this point—has focused on the economic benefits of nanotechnology, rather than its potential risks. The influence of media coverage on attitudes toward nanotechnology can be attributed to at least two media effects models. Cultivation effects refer to the idea that perceptions of reality are shaped over time by consonant media portrayals, especially in entertainment outlets. This explains more recent phenomena, such as the Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) effect, but cultivation research examining episodic portrayals of science and scientists in entertainment media and their impact on public attitudes dates back to the 1960s. A particularly interesting area of research on cultivation effects related to science is the growing prominence of nanotechnology as a theme in comic books and their motion picture adaptations.

The second model of media influences on attitudes is framing. It is based on the idea that journalists covering issues, such as nanotechnology, need to reduce complexity for lay readers, and therefore rely on metaphors or other linguistic tools in order to allow readers to make connections between new technologies and what they already know. The power of these frames stems from the fact that even subtle differences in how issues are presented in mass media can change the cognitive schema that people use when making sense of this information. The competing frames of nanotechnology as the “next plastic” or “next asbestos” are good illustrations.

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