Do People Form or Frame Opinions About Nano?

September 26, 2008

It's election time and everyone has their opinions. I always feel a little guilty around this time because I never feel like I know ENOUGH about my candidate of choice and yet I feel pretty sure that I would never vote for the other guy.

How people form opinions about political candidates is similar to how they form attitudes toward emerging technologies, especially those like nanotechnology or stem cell research that are rife with controversy. You'd think -- or at least you'd hope -- that people (including me) would form their opinions by gathering all of the facts, sorting them into the appropriate issues, and coming to a reasoned (right?) conclusion. You'd think that the more informed we were, the better decision we'd make.

Well, last week, while attending the "Nano Meets Bio" conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison one of the speakers made a strong case for the opposite. Deitram Scheufele, is a professor of communication (among many other things) and co-leader of the Public Opinion and Values Research Team for the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University, told us that knowledge plays a small role in shaping people’s opinions and attitudes about science and technology.

Here's the thing. We only have so much brain power and capacity and try as we may to gather up all of the facts about nanotechnology or stem cell research or a political candidate, we can't. It's not humanly possible. And in fact, we are using our brains to do other, arguably more important things, like our jobs and eat and survive and makes sure our kids survive and pay the freakin' mortgage and remember our mother's birthday. We can't be bothered to know everything. So we take cognitive short cuts, something called heuristics.

According to Scheufele, how we interpret information has to do with the way it's framed. Are we exploring for new energy or drilling for oil? We're used to the media and politicians framing their message. But guess what? We do it to ourselves. We have a mental framework, a schemata, which we use to organize current knowledge and future understanding. And the external messages that stick with us are those that trigger our internal schemata.

You can see, then, how the same message may be interpreted differently by two different people. And what's more interesting is that having more information about a particular topic won't necessarily alter a person's opinion.

I've asked Scheufele to write something up for the Tech site about this intriguing idea and in the meantime, he's given me permission to share this article he wrote, which goes into more detail. It's a good read. Not sciency or jargony at all. It's pretty clear, after reading it, what he does for a living.

Image:                 John Lund