Letter abstract
Nature Nanotechnology 4, 91 - 94 (2008)
Published online: 7 December 2008 | doi:10.1038/nnano.2008.361
Subject Category: Ethical, legal and other societal issues
Religious beliefs and public attitudes toward nanotechnology in Europe and the United States
Dietram A. Scheufele1, Elizabeth A. Corley2, Tsung-jen Shih3, Kajsa E. Dalrymple3 & Shirley S. Ho4
Abstract
How do citizens make sense of nanotechnology as more applications reach the market and the mainstream media start to debate the potential risks and benefits of technology1? As with many other political and scientific issues, citizens rely on cognitive shortcuts or heuristics to make sense of issues for which they have low levels of knowledge2. These heuristics can include predispositional factors, such as ideological beliefs or value systems3, and also short-term frames of reference provided by the media or other sources of information4. Recent research suggests that 'religious filters' are an important heuristic for scientific issues in general5, and nanotechnology in particular6. A religious filter is more than a simple correlation between religiosity and attitudes toward science: it refers to a link between benefit perceptions and attitudes that varies depending on respondents' levels of religiosity. In surveys, seeing the benefits of nanotechnology is consistently linked to more positive attitudes about nanotechnology among less religious respondents, with this effect being significantly weaker for more religious respondents6. For this study, we have combined public opinion surveys in the United States with Eurobarometer surveys about public attitudes toward nanotechnology in Europe to compare the influence of religious beliefs on attitudes towards nanotechnology in the United States and Europe. Our results show that respondents in the United States were significantly less likely to agree that nanotechnology is morally acceptable than respondents in many European countries. These moral views correlated directly with aggregate levels of religiosity in each country, even after controlling for national research productivity and measures of science performance for high-school students.
- Department of Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 309 Hiram Smith Hall, 1545 Observatory Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA
- School of Public Affairs, Arizona State University, 411 North Central Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona 85004, USA
- School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 821 University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA
- Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, 31 Nanyang Link, Singapore 637718, Singapore
Correspondence to: Dietram A. Scheufele1 e-mail: Scheufele@wisc.edu
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