Consequences of media information uptake and deliberation: focus groups’ symbolic coping with synthetic biology

Abstract

Whenever a new, potentially controversial technology enters public awareness, stakeholders suggest that education and public engagement are needed to ensure public support. Both theoretical and empirical analyses suggest, however, that more information and more deliberation per se will not make people more supportive. Rather, taking into account the functions of public sense-making processes, attitude polarisation is to be expected. In a real-world experiment, this study on synthetic biology investigated the effect of information uptake and deliberation on opinion certainty and opinion valence in natural groups. The results suggest (a) that biotechnology represents an important anchor for sense-making processes of synthetic biology, (b) that real-world information uptake and deliberation make people feel more certain about their opinions, and (c) that group attitudes are likely to polarise over the course of deliberation if the issue is important to the groups.

Analogies, metaphors, and wondering about the future: Lay sense-making around synthetic meat

“…Moreover, it has noted how what is novel and unfamiliar is rendered familiar by being located (or anchored) in existing frames of knowledge (Kronberger, Holtz and Wagner, 2012;Courvoisier, Clémence and Green, 2013). However, such studies often fail to mention at what point in the innovation process public opinion is sought.…”

“…Secondly, it can help anticipate emerging ethical or social issues thus helping to minimise unnecessarily disruptive public controversies. Therefore, the public's unfamiliarity with novel technologies can offer the appropriate context in which to observe how people deal with unfamiliarity 'unadulterated' by media coverage, and identify which more familiar technologies the new object of knowledge might be compared to (Kronberger et al, 2012). In this paper we take an emerging food technology -synthetic meat -as the example, and we explore how the public make sense of the unfamiliar.…”

“…Arguably people articulated questions more clearly online than in the focus groups, as in the latter there was a propensity for participants to agree with one another and for their opinions to converge. Driven perhaps by social conventions around group interactions and the need to establish a common frame of reference this ties in with the observation that when discussing novel technologies in a group people can become more certain in their opinions about a technology but not necessarily more supportive of it (Kronberger et al, 2012). This highlights the value of exploring sense-making individually where participants are not considering the issue in the immediate context of others' opinions.…”

Uncritical and unbalanced coverage of synthetic biology in the Nordic press

“…It can be defined as "the deliberate design and construction of customised biological and which issues to bring forth and how the issues are shaped (for the public, decision-makers, and interest groups) (Nisbet et al, 2003). Mass media not only informs the public but also shapes ideas about a number of issues (Kronberger et al, 2012;Scheufele, 1999;Valkenburg et al, 1999). They do this by underscoring specific facts or values, and by providing interpretive schemes (Nelson et al, 1997;Scheufele, 1999).…”

Do Public Involvement Activities in Biomedical Research and Innovation Recruit Representatively? A Systematic Qualitative Review

“…Based on the specific objective of a PIA study, the desired type of representation may vary. For instance, in one PIA on synthetic biology, participants were selected according to ‘different natural groups who meet on a regular basis, share a common identity (such as being members of an organisation or NGO), and hence are likely to represent relevant real-life conversation partners for each other when discussing new and unfamiliar issues' [29]. In another PIA that aimed to assess attitudes on human cloning, the sample was intended ‘to reflect the demographic profile of the populations in the various group locations' [30].…”