Fatal attraction: the intuitive appeal of GMO opposition

Abstract

Explaining public opposition to GMOs 11Concerns about health, environmental and socio-economic hazards have resulted in a strong 12 public opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) [1][2][3]. These worries tend to have a 13 large impact on national and international policies. For instance, in India, the government 14 suspended the culture of Bacillus thuringiensis-engineered Solanum melongena (Bt brinjal), 15 despite the initial approval for commercialization [4]. In Europe, the lack of public support for 16 GMOs has led to a de facto moratorium within the European Union on new GM crops from 1999 17 to 2004 and has steered the development of an extremely strict and expensive regulatory 18 framework concerning the import and cultivation of GM crops [5]. In Africa and Asia, the 19 resistance to GMOs has had tragic consequences, costing thousands of lives [6, 7]. 20However, research shows that cultivation of GM crops does not pose any specific health 21 or environmental risks, but instead can bring benefits to local farmers [8][9][10][11]. The reason for the 22 discrepancy between public opinion and scientific evidence needs clarification. Some people 23 suggest that post-Christian beliefs or romantic notions of nature are responsible, whereas others 24 blame the lack of direct benefits for Western consumers [6, 12, 13]. These accounts are definitely 25 on the right track. Nonetheless, they fail to explain why opposition also occurs in non-Christian 26 cultures, why people do not reject every technology that brings no immediate benefits or why 27 people prefer romantic views in the first place. 28Here, we suggest a cognitive approach to account for the opposition to GMOs. In other 29 words, we use ideas from the cognitive sciences, evolutionary psychology and cultural attraction 30 to rationalize the popularity and typical features of this phenomenon. We argue that intuitions 31 and emotions make the mind highly susceptible to particular negative representations of GMOs. 91In their campaigns, opponents of GMOs explicitly appeal to these essentialist intuitions by intuitions. These intuitions tend to translate in religious beliefs, but they can also contribute to a 103 quasi-religious view on nature [30, 31]. Indeed, large parts of Europe, where the resistance 104 against GM food is strong, are highly secular. In the cognitive science of religion, religion is 105 commonly assumed to be a byproduct, generated by the peculiarities of our mental make-up that 106 includes essentialist thinking, but that is also highly receptive to the feeling that the world has 107 been designed for a particular purpose [32][33][34][35]. This design illusion has effectively been 108 debunked by evolutionary theory, but the mix of essentialist, teleological and intentional biases 109 continues to allure a lot of people in believing that a certain order exists in nature that should not 110 be meddled with. Indeed, genetic engineering is considered the opposite of "natural" [3, 36]. activists bombard the public with edite...

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