Plant biotechnology and public attitudes

People will not consume foods that they believe are risky, or associate with some other negative attribute. Consumer concerns focus on different issues depending on the type of food under consideration and may include, for example, beliefs that there is potential for negative environmental impact associated with production processes or agricultural practices, perceptions that there is uncertainty associated with unintended human or animal health effects, or even that these unintended effects are completely unpredictable and unknown. Finally, people may believe that there are potential consequences for the way in which society is organised, (for example, people may perceive that changes in technology may shift local agricultural production to globalised systems increasing people’s dependence on multi-national companies), which may result in further concern (Frewer, in press). For this reason, considerable effort has been directed towards understanding people’s attitudes towards emerging food technologies generally, and genetically modified foods specifically. There has been concern within the scientific and policy community that people might potentially reject consumer products which have been introduced into the market place as a result of new developments in the biosciences. Indeed, since the early 1980s, an enormous amount of research has been conducted by social scientists directed towards understanding public perceptions of genetically modified foods (Zechendorf, 1994). Approaches adopted have ranged from simple ‘opinion poll’ methodologies which tend to focus on items relating to acceptance or rejection of genetic technologies (for example, Euro barometer, 1997), to more scientific and thoughtful attempts to develop causal models explaining the interrelationships between, for example, the extent to which people trust institutions responsible for regulation and technology development, and perceptions of risk and benefits associated with gene technology (see, for example, Siegrist 1999; Frewer, Scholderer, and Bredahl, in press).

Despite increased understanding of what is driving public concern, consumer acceptance of novel foods produced using emerging bioscience techniques such as genetic modification has been rather low, perhaps because the complexity of the interrelationship between science and society has been not properly understood. The politics of technology acceptance must be considered when developing new products and processes.

Risk managers have become keenly aware that in democratic countries [public] perceptions of a technology’s risks and benefits are important components of the . . . political decision process, from initial decisions to developing a technology or product, to the acceptance of management approaches to risk mitigation (Siegrist et al., 2000, p. 353).

There has also been a shift in emphasis linked to why researchers are attempting to understand peoples attitude’s towards agricultural and plant biotechnology, and associated novel foods which these processes produce. Fifteen years ago the emphasis of risk perception research and communication efforts linked to the use of technology in the food chain was technology acceptance. At the time of writing, there is much more debate about how to increase transparency in risk management processes and greater involvement of the public in deciding how to manage and regulate technology innovation. In particular, there has been considerable emphasis in recent times on communicating information relevant to people’s concerns, (for example, ethical considerations in the development and implementation of technology), as well as developing strategies to convey information to the public about probabilistic risk-assessment processes.

More recent research has implied that trust in science and risk regulators, and public confidence in scientific advice, has powerful explanatory power in the context of how people respond to and interpret information. Recent theoretical stances have developed the idea that distrust of institutions (partly through perceived exclusion from the decision-making machinery linked to government and science) represents a key driver in creating and fuelling public negativity to scientific innovation and risk management practices (HM Government, 2001). Efforts to understand the psychological determinants of trust (in information sources and regulatory institutions) laid the groundwork for subsequent analysis of how complex risk information is processed and transmitted (Cvetkovich and Löfstedt, 1999). However, the need for explicit public involvement in risk management policy has emerged as a key driver in initiatives to increase public confidence in technological risk-management itself (Rowe and Frewer, 2000), with emphasis on how the output of consultation can explicitly, as opposed to implicitly, be used in policy (Frewer and Salter, in press).

Public attitudes towards emerging biosciences such as genetic modification must be understood if effective communication about both the associated risks and benefits is to be developed. However, research into attitudes is also relevant to understanding how the relationship between science and society, public trust and governance of technology might democratically evolve in the future. A useful first stage for the purposes of the current discussion is to define what is meant by the term ‘attitude’, and to describe some of the theoretical contexts in which attitude research is embedded.