Team:Manchester/Surveys SBS
World-View, Religion and The Perception of Synthetic Biology Applications
- We challenged internal biases in a politically stressed social climate.
- We identified a trend where moral support for biotechnology decreases as intimacy to the product increases.
- We successfully identified the two predominant world-views in our sample population: 67.5% of respondents classified as nurturant and 32.5% as purpose rational.
- We found that religion and world-view does not significantly influence moral support for biotechnology.
- We found that comprehension was correlated with an individuals’ confidence about synthetic biology but this did not influence moral support.
Our survey
- Survey was open from 1st August to 22nd September 2020.
- Respondents were approached via social media, people could then choose to participate or not.
- Response rate = 100%.
- N = 77 responses.
We started our Human Practice work by examining previous social science studies that looked at public attitudes towards synthetic biology. We wanted to know how people viewed synthetic biology in general to help us understand any criticisms towards our project and be able to respond to those criticisms appropriately. It was during this initial research period that we came across the paper “Technology and morality: Influences on public attitudes toward biotechnology” by Evensen C, Hoban, T and Woodrun E. This paper used national survey data to test the effects on individuals’ objections to biotechnology applied to plants and animals. This study identified three world-views that may shape attitudes towards biotechnology: the purpose-rational, the nurturant and the creationist. The paper argues that these 3 views represent major alternatives in previous discussion about the morality of biotechnology. In the opinion of the paper people who fall under the purpose-rational category believe that humans are the dominant race and organic resources are for our use. In contrast a nurturant individual is less formally rational and cares more about the planet than the progression of human society. Finally, creationism states that the world was created in 7 days by the typical Christian representation of God. Creationist concerns constitute intrinsic objections that through the use of biotechnology scientists are “playing God” and disrupting the natural order of the world.
Overall, this paper was able to make conclusions about how a persons’ world-view would influence their attitude towards biotechnology. Importantly the paper found that the purpose-rational and nurturant world-view are not mutually exclusive however, neither view had direct effects on moral objection to the use of biotechnology on plants and animals. Instead, moral objection is attributed to extrinsic material gains and losses provided by biotechnology. Finally, this study found that people who believed in the creationist story had strong moral objections to biotechnology being used on both plants and animals (Evensen et al., 2000).
We found this paper to be extremely interesting and we wanted to test its conclusions in a modern setting. In 20 years since the papers’ first release the political and social climate of society has changed dramatically. Moreover, considering the impact of the coronavirus pandemic public attitudes towards biotechnology may be more or less positive depending how people have responded to the pandemic. The dramatic changes that have occurred over the decades may have produced a society wherein an individual's world-view has more of an impact on what they find to be morally acceptable. We were curious to see if in a constantly evolving society if these world-views were still identifiable in people and whether they had more or less of an impact now than in 2000.
For this reason we decided to design our own survey analysing these perceptions. In particular our survey tests what sort of synthetic biology applications respondents are comfortable with while also determining their own world-view. We then used correlations to identify any biasing of application type based on the respondents world-view or religious status. Furthermore, we realised that by today’s modern standards Christianity is not a good representation of different religious ideals. Therefore, instead of limiting our survey we adapted our survey to include the question, “on a scale of 1 (not important at all) to 10 (very important) how important is religion to you?”. This question allows people of all religious backgrounds to be included in the survey, this will also provide more validity to our conclusions as we have considered religious influences beyond Christianity.
- Survey open from 1st of August to the 22nd of September 2020.
- Released onto Facebook, the link to the surveys accompanied a short text explaining the goal of the surveys and why we were conducting them, this included an explanation of the iGEM competition. Each member of our team shared the survey on their own Facebook pages to encourage a more global response.
- Survey was also shared to Manchester university’s Facebook group meaning all students in the Manchester area were able to access the survey if they wanted to.
- Survey was shared across our iGEM Instagram and by our partner team St. Andrews to further our reach of respondents.
- N = 77 responses.
- The survey platform was google forms.
This release method was chosen due to social distancing regulations. Originally, we had planned to approach people in the city centre alongside releasing the survey online. This method would have allowed us to reach a greater sample of older individuals, Facebook student groups are limited because they mostly represent educated, 18-25 year olds who may have radically different ideals compared to the older generations. Furthermore, it is possible that we received responses from other biology students meaning their understanding of synthetic biology might be disproportionate to the general publics.
Acceptability Results
Before we began factoring in people’s world-view and religious influences we wanted to know how acceptable different synthetic biology applications were to our respondents. We asked our respondents to rate how comfortable they would be using 5 different synthetic biology applications of varying intimacy to the human subject. Our scale of intimacy ranges from using synthetically derived sustainable fuel alternatives to ingesting synthetic biology products and editing human DNA. We also included two positive controls for our survey: using conventional skin care products and pharmaceutical drugs. We made the assumption that the majority of respondents would find these products acceptable because they are already in everyday use.
- When asked about using conventional skin care products 14.3% of respondents gave a score of 5 or lower. This does not align with what we anticipated and thus these results do not classify as a good positive control.
- Our positive control, (using conventional pharmaceutical drugs), had 0 scores under 6 and 50.6% of respondents scored it 10. This follows our expectations, individual differences may result in some variation of score from 6-10 however, the majority of people find this acceptable.
- When asked how comfortable people would be using genetically modified bacteria to transform cooking oil waste into an efficient fuel to sustainably replace diesel 66.2% of respondents said they would be completely comfortable and gave an acceptability score of 10. Only one individual gave a score below 5 demonstrating that the majority of people are happy with these types of low-intimacy applications.
- When asked about making significant changes to human DNA to treat debilitating diseases 19.5% of respondents gave a score less than 5.
This trend continued throughout with high intimacy products such as ingesting genetically modified plants receiving more low-scoring respondents. In contrast, low intimacy products such as using genetically modified bacteria to degrade pollutants had 50.6% of respondents score a 10 and only one response under 5. Overall, these findings would suggest that the majority of people begin to react negatively to synthetic biology when it involves a close proximity to their own bodies, this could be due to personal concerns over health or a general distrust of synthetic biology. We expected this to translate to our application: using reef-safe sunscreen produced by genetically modified bacteria however this was not the case. Unexpectedly our application received only one score below 5, meaning the majority of people in our sample were comfortable using synthetically derived sunscreen. We speculate this is because the skin acts as a border to the internal environment, it is likely people are more uncomfortable interacting with applications that enter this environment due to the sensitive and complicated nature of the human body. This would explain the relatively more low-scores found for eating genetically modified plants and human DNA editing. This could be tested in future further investigation. From our results we can expect a positive response to our project with the majority of people finding it acceptable.
A Friedman test was performed against all of the potential applications and P value of <0.0001 was obtained. This means that there is a significant difference between the mean acceptability levels for each application. 3 stars indicate a P value of less than 0.0001, 2 stars indicate a P value of less than 0.001. These results tell us that there is a reason for the difference in acceptability and it is not down to random chance, we suggest that a potential explanation is the varying intimacy of the application to the subject.
Religion and its Relationship to Moral Support
To see if religion influenced people’s support for our project, we performed a correlation between a respondents’ religious score (how important religion is to the respondent) and their acceptability score for reef-friendly sunscreen produced by transgenic bacteria and conventional skin care. This was then compared to our positive control. The correlations were found to be insignificant with P values of 0.0939, 0.9360 and 0.1292 respectively. The results suggest that religion or religious beliefs might not be influencing perception of synthetic biology applications. However, further testing is necessary to confirm this conclusion.
This contrasts what was found in the original paper; a strong Creationist belief system was always associated with lower support for biotechnology regardless of the subject of the application. On the other hand, it is also possible that the lack of religious influence could be explained by our limited sample.
- 40.1% of respondents said religion was not important to them at all.
- 84.4% of respondents gave religion a score of 5 or under.
This shows that for our sample the majority of people are likely to be atheist or agnostic and this is expected from a sample composed mostly of Millennials and Generation Z. Therefore, it is possible that if this survey was performed again using a more representative sample, religion may have a greater impact on acceptability of applications. The resultant correlation for reef-friendly sunscreen made by transgenic bacteria had a R value of -0.19, similarly our positive control also had a R value of -0.17. This demonstrates a negative relationship between religion and acceptability which implies that with a less limited sample we would see religion having more of an affect.
We also wanted to see if identifying as highly religious predisposed someone to either type of world-view however, this was not the case: individuals reporting a high importance of religion were not more likely to be purpose-rational or nurturant. Finally, two respondents in our survey reported religion as being very important to them and scored it 10/10. These individuals had opposite results throughout the survey, one always scored synthetic biology applications as very low (1-2) while the other always scored them very high (8-10). This demonstrates how religion is not influencing acceptability, if this was the case, we would expect to see similar scores from both respondents. This supports our finding from our correlations that religion is not a significant influence on moral objection to biotechnology.
World-View and its Relationship to Moral Support
To determine respondents world-view we asked 3 questions which required respondents to select between two statements which they identified more with. Depending on their answers to these questions they were sorted into a nurturant or purpose-rational category.
- 67.5% of respondents classified as nurturant.
- 32.5% of respondents classified as purpose rational.
A Shapiro-Wilks normality test was applied to the data and a medium score was calculated for each data set.
- For our positive control (use of conventional drugs) the medium nurturant score was 9 and purpose rational was 10.
- When using reef-friendly sunscreen made by transgenic bacteria the medium nurturant score was 10 and the purpose rational was 9.
- For use conventional skin care products the medium nurturant score was 8 and the medium purpose rational score was 8.
There is a small increase of 1 between our positive control and reef-friendly sunscreen for the nurturant category and an increase of 2 from conventional skin care. This aligns with what we know about the nurturant world-view; nurturant individuals are emotional about ecological issues and believe that humans have a responsibility to care for the environment. Therefore, a synthetic biology application that attempts to restore ecosystem productivity would be more appealing to this group over simply using pharmaceutical drugs and skin care products which have no obvious benefit for the environment. Despite this our results suggest that an individual’s world-view cannot accurately predict what types of applications they will support and this aligns with what was found in the original study. Our results demonstrate how as inventors we cannot make predictions about what will do well in markets but rather, we have a duty to communicate with our stakeholders personally as their opinions might surprise us. For example, we expected the purpose-rational score for sunscreen produced by transgenic bacteria to be lower because it does not progress human society but this was not the case. The differences between these scores are not significant meaning that although these world-view types are still identifiable in today’s population it does not impact moral objection or support for biotechnology.
Comprehension and Confidence
We wanted to see how knowledgeable our sample size was about synthetic biology and its applications to determine if understanding a subject equates to moral support. To test this we asked individuals to select words from a list that were correctly associated with synthetic biology. For every correct word we awarded +1 and -1 for every incorrect word resulting in a total “comprehension score”, the maximum was 8.
We were then curious to see if individuals could correctly estimate their own comprehension so we asked respondents to score from 1 (disagree strongly) to 10 (agree strongly) how much they agreed with the statement, “I have a good understanding of synthetic biology and its applications”. These scores were then correlated together and a linear regression was applied. We found a strong positive correlation (R= P<0.0001) between comprehension and understanding. However, it is worth noting that our results had a lot of variation around the linear regression and this might be because confidence is not the same as knowledge. We could potentially explain these results with the Dunning-Kruger effect; a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability (2). Conversely, cultural differences are known to impact this cognitive bias and it can operate in the reverse; people with high ability underestimate their ability (3). This effect demonstrates how confidence doesn’t always equate to comprehension rather the two are linked; the more information you know about a subject the more confident you can be in your answers. Overall, we found a spread of understanding across our sample meaning these results are more likely to be an accurate representation of public understanding of synthetic biology in developed countries.
The comprehension scores were then correlated with the acceptability score for our positive control, conventional skin care and reef-friendly sunscreen produced by transgenic bacteria. The correlations yielded a r value of -0.037, 0.065 and 0.013 respectively. A linear regression was also applied and the correlations deemed insignificant. This means that comprehension of biotechnology does not equate to moral support for that technology. This aligns with what was found in the original paper by Evensen et al who concluded that people’s moral objections were mostly determined by their material gains and losses as a result of the application, rather than understanding of synthetic biology. For example, applications that increased economic wealth tended to have higher support than those which didn’t. This finding also supports previous survey findings from much larger studies which have challenged the comprehension bias previously. In this analysis we found a link between confidence and comprehension but this relationship does not extend to moral support.
Conclusions
In conclusion our results mostly align with what was found in the original study conducted in 2000 by Evensen and colleagues.
- We have found that we are capable of identifying nurturant and purpose-rational world-view types within our sample, but we did not find evidence to support world-views influencing moral support. We did not test whether material gain would influence support as the original paper, but we can speculate that this would also be the case for our sample.
- We did not find evidence to support an association between religiosity and moral support. This contrasts what was found in the original paper, wherein identifying as a Creationist resulted in lower support for biotechnology on both plants and animals. This suggests that in modern society religion does not influence our perception of synthetic biology as strongly as it previously did however, it is possible the influence of religion is reduced due to limitations of our sample.
- We found that comprehension is positively correlated with confidence however, this does not equate to high acceptability of an application. It is a weakness of our survey that we could not ask respondents about every possible type of synthetic biology application meaning world-view, comprehension and religion may be more impactful when talking about more controversial forms of synthetic biology, such as embryo editing and/or the addition of genetic circuits.
