Swinburne University of Technology - Melbourne Australia

Trust drawn from the messenger, not the message

Story by Rebecca Thyer

The latest 'snapshot' of attitudes to science and technology shows Australians are quite relaxed about wind farms, but regard the omnipresent world wide web with a degree of caution. Why? Delve a little deeper in search of that answer and an interesting tale emerges about how attitudes are formed.

Each year a team of social science students from Swinburne University of Technology interview 1000 people from across Australia to gauge attitudes to technology-related issues. Carried out by Swinburne's Australian Centre for Emerging Technologies and Society - which examines the social, political, psychological and ethical dimensions of emerging technologies - the results become the basis of the Swinburne National Science and Technology Monitor.

Centre director Professor Michael Gilding says that the survey consistently finds that Australians have a positive attitude to technology. "We might not know much about a specific area of science or its technological application, but we still believe that science and technology are generally improving our quality of life," he says.

But although Professor Gilding says there is an element of 'she'll be right' in people's attitudes, the general support for technology cannot be taken for granted. He says it depends heavily on people's confidence in public and scientific institutions, which is part of the survey's probing.

For the most part, scientific institutions such as CSIRO come out on top and the commercial media sits securely at the bottom. The comfort gap between wind farms and the web, by the way, reflects that some people have been left behind in the internet revolution and therefore feel uncomfortable about it. Support for wind farms is somewhat abstract, he says, as most people do not live near them.

Professor Gilding says trust in those delivering the information is crucial because when presented with complex scientific or technological issues, people often take a short cut and form an opinion based on the information source rather than the information itself.

"Attitude does not correlate with knowledge," he says. "Attitude has more to do with trust than public education. In Australia trust in public research organisations is critical."

Renske Pin, a PhD student from the University of Twente in the Netherlands who worked with the Swinburne team in 2007, says trust is a delicate emotion. "If people trust the information source, they are more inclined to trust the information."

Ms Pin says the team is now working to try to model the attitude-trust relationship and ascribe a mathematical relationship to it.

Her interest in the Swinburne survey stems from her research into perceptions of nutrigenomics - a science that seeks to tailor nutrition to people's genetic disposition and hence reduce disease rates. "I was interested in what the Australian public thinks about a personalised diet, based on their gene structure and, by asking the same questions here as in the Netherlands, compare the answers."

Her findings mirrored Professor Gilding's - Australians are positive about the benefits science and technology offers, but are not always welcoming of new developments.

The Swinburne National Science and Technology Monitor found that just over half of those questioned were uncomfortable with genetically modified (GM) plants and about two-thirds expressed similar unease about GM animals being used for food.

Despite this, the Victorian and NSW governments went ahead to allow the commercial growing of GM canola for food products - a decision that Professor Gilding says could now help the team map how opinions change.

"Over the past five years we've been struck by how consistent our findings are - once opinions are formed they are quite difficult to shift. What happens in our 2008 monitor could be very interesting because finally the GM debate means something. Hopefully it will provide us with an exemplary case study of how attitudes change."

As the director for the Centre of Law and Genetics at the University of Tasmania, Professor Donald Chalmers always looks to the Swinburne monitor to gauge public attitudes.

Professor Chalmers, who is also the university's Dean of Law, says survey results show that Australia is not a country divided on issues such as GM food. "Instead, there is a narrow band of difference in public attitudes and everyone - those opposed to GM and those for it - want more information. Everyone wants to be consulted, they want information and they don't want to leave decision making purely to scientists."

He says that new challenges - such as climate change - could see opinions towards GM crops shift. "For example, some drought-tolerant GM varieties have the ability to help out in conditions more likely in a changed climate. This could change people's minds on GM crops."

Professor Gilding says monitoring public opinion on science and technology has become more important in the last decade and this will continue.

"With technology changing so quickly, for some people it has become a 'double-edged sword'," he says. "It brings enormous capacity, but also potential problems. The public has a role in developing new technologies so it's important to understand public perception and find out what they are influenced by."