Sub Groups

SEMINAR FOR ACADEMICS AT THE NATIONAL CONSUMER COUNCIL, GROSVENOR GARDENS, LONDON SW1

16 JANUARY 2001

Note of Issues Discussed at the Seminar

Present
Professor Robin Grove-White, AEBC
Ms Anna Bradley, AEBC
Dr Ed Dart, AEBC

Professor Glynis Breakwell, Surrey University
Dr Lynn Frewer, Institute of Food Research
Professor George Gaskell, LSE
Professor Tom Horlick-Jones, Cardiff University
Professor Nick Pidgeon, University of East Anglia
Dr Peter Simmons, Lancaster University
Dr Andrew Stirling, University of Sussex
Professor Brian Wynne, University of Lancaster
Ms Michele Corrado, MORI (afternoon only)

Mrs Anne Packer, AEBC Secretariat

Introductions; background to seminar
1. This note summarises some of the main points emerging during the day's discussions, as a way of reporting back to members of the AEBC's developmental group on public attitudes and consumer choice, and to the Commission as a whole.

2. The seminar was co-chaired by Anna Bradley and Robin Grove-White.

3. Anna Bradley welcomed participants to the National Consumer Council (NCC). Public attitudes towards biotechnology in agriculture and the environment were an area of central interest to the Agriculture and Biotechnology Commission (AEBC).

4. Robin Grove-White explained the background to the day, which was envisaged as an open-ended discussion between, primarily, academic colleagues. The aim was to explore the possibility of building creative links between the Commission and a range of specialists in social research fields relevant to public attitudes towards GM agriculture and foods. All of those participating had at least some experience of the policy world.

5. Participants had copies of the AEBC Work Plan, published the previous week. The AEBC had a strategic role on advising on agriculture, environment and biotechnology, and had been established alongside two other strategic bodies: the Food Standards Agency, responsible for foods, and the Human Genetics Commission. The AEBC had a diverse membership, and was working initially through sub-groups on strategic decision making in biotechnology, animals and biotechnology, and horizon scanning. In the policy world, there was the constraint that insights had often to be generated in short timescales. Understanding of public views was crucial, about both current and prospective future issues, to help AEBC to advise the Government on the framework of GM regulation and development.

6. Ed Dart and the social researchers introduced themselves. The researchers had been involved in a wide variety of relevant studies, from a range of social scientific disciplinary backgrounds. Each had prepared a note about the main focus of his/her unit's work. These notes had been circulated in advance of the meeting.

Nature and drivers of recent UK public responses to GM crops

7. As an initial stimulus for discussion, participants were invited to reflect on several 'aunt sally' propositions (put together by Robin Grove-White), encapsulating apparent 'received wisdoms' about public attitudes often mooted in GM policy and industrial contexts - with a view to establishing the range of views and perspectives amongst those present.

8. The propositions in question were:

• That "people are either 'for' or 'against' GM crop technology";
• That "people are irrational/ unscientific; their concerns have no intellectual basis";
• That "people's concerns about risk of GMs are ethical and political, not scientific";
• That "people have unrealistic expectations of 'zero risk'";
• That "people's views are unduly influenced by media and NGO biases".

(a) Rather than being simply 'pro' or 'con', UK public responses to GM crops/foods are complex, graded, often discriminating - and, crucially, influenced by experience of wider social and political issues and perceptions. It is misleading to suppose that all of such concerns can or should be captured in terms of 'risk' or 'safety' (pace much official and industrial discussion).

(b) There are a diversity of public and institutional values, which generate differently modulated responses. Regrettably, this diversity tends not to be reflected in public discussion of such matters.

(c) Simplistic 'Yes'-'No' characterisations of public attitudes towards GMs tend to emerge from media, NGO and industry selectivity, reinforcing established positions. However, there is little conclusive evidence that people generally have been unduly swayed by such representations.

(d) Much sceptical public reaction towards GM crops/foods appears to reflect unease at the sensed narrowness of the range of factors given weight in political (regulatory) oversight processes, such as standard Risk Assessment methods. In this sense, sceptical public reactions may be read in part as implicit criticisms of such methods, and of the terms in which they are cast.

(e) People generally are not 'irrational' or simply 'emotional' towards GM crops/foods. Whilst individuals may lack technical understanding, their attitudes tend to be reasonably grounded, when understood in the context of their own experience (whether of food, of agricultural practices, or of regulatory behaviour in relation to 'uncertainty').

(f) Many people are uneasy about the intentions and practices of those within industry and government seen as 'promoting' GM crops and foods. There is concern about the apparent haste and perceived sidelining of potential future 'surprises' in their promotion.

(g) Recurrent claims about the 'unnatural' character of GM foods/crops are often related to wider concerns about the current ownership and directions of scientific research in this field. Such concerns need to be understood in their full 'ethical' dimensions.

(h) People are not seeking 'Zero Risk' in relation to GMs. They are generally sophisticated and realistic about the necessity to handle uncertainty in everyday life - including in relation to new technologies. But there is scepticism about what are perceived as unrealistically confident claims of 'no risk' in relation to GMs by those seen as self-interested.

(i) Different social research methods (quantitative polls and surveys, qualitative interviews and discussion groups, etc) can and do document different dimensions of public responses to GMs. No one method can convey the full picture, and there are many unknowns. Hence there is a need for triangulation between and across methods - if robust insights are to be generated for public policy purposes.

(j) Despite the range of recent research studies on GM public attitudes pointing to conclusions like those in (a)-(i) above, the participants' experience had been that government had taken little of this on board. There appeared to be a lack of appropriate 'interpretative' social scientific expertise within the relevant bodies, able to make use of such findings. In this context, the creation of the AEBC was noted as a potentially positive development.

• Ability to describe for AEBC what is known about public attitudes: snapshots of different areas, for both short and medium term purposes.
• Ability to identify and advise on appropriate tools to help AEBC in its developing interactions with the public,
• Means of evaluation and 'reflexive' self-examination for AEBC of its own work and modus operandi.

• E mail fast responses
  
• A three-monthly meeting, agenda driven by AEBC but network members could include items
  
• Consensus papers
  
• Issue-specific studies

• Views are very complex, and saying that people accept the technology if it has visible benefits and not otherwise is also an over-simplification;
  
  
• Peoples' views tended to depend on the conditions at the time, and on what evidence was available to them at the time;
  
  
• To find out under what conditions and to which people something is acceptable, the range of issues would include who benefits from it;
  
  
• Research findings should not be understood as yielding 'belief statements' - but rather as indications of people trying to make sense of a complex and informationally dense field;
  
  
• People often cite social science, and say that the public has the same view, in order to support their own view, and this can bring the credibility of social science into question;
  
  
• It may be possible to provide the very broad contours of movements in public attitudes eg via the Eurobarometer, but the important question for policy may be what people bring to bear in reaching their conclusions;
  
  
• Certain social science academics may have more to contribute about why people think things than about what they think; how perceptions come about could also be useful for the AEBC;
  
  
• No single social research approach has a 'true' answer - framing of questions, and methods of interpretation of results necessarily shape the researchers' conclusions reached;
  
  
• Stability of peoples' views could be included in the range of indicators and tools;
  
  
• On trust, the desire and search for peoples' trust was a red herring, though absence of trust was important. Trust is earned, and a question might be 'how do we gain trust?', rather than 'how do we get people to trust us?'
  
  
• GM technology may be an icon for a wider set of issues about regulation of technical innovation; if so, the initial, general statement may in some ways not be so far off the mark.

• Whether or not concerns were thought to be 'irrational' or 'unscientific' depended on definitions, but people showed plenty of common sense;
  
  
• Social scientific discussion of 'rationality' had been ongoing for over 40 years, but had reached no unambiguous conclusions. So the issue might not be worth pursuing, though some observations from prospect theory may merit scrutiny. In particular, people may over-estimate small risks, and tend to take more account of disbenefits than benefits;
  
  
• Responses to questionnaires tends to suggest that peoples' answers may result from habit rather than a 'rationalistic' decision-making process, at least at the time the question is asked - based on the dominant response of groups the person wants to be associated with;
  
  
• It may not add anything to the debate to say that concerns in one area are irrational; concerns were often about wider issues in technology than just the science itself; modern science itself is esoteric and complex, so people don't have the time or inclination to be up to date with all of it;
  
  
• It is a mistake in any discussions if some elements eg ethics are seen as just emotional and vacuous;
  
  
• Sometimes it seemed as if when a group of professionals created their own group identity, as a defensive mechanism they tended to consider other peoples' (differing) views as irrational;
  
  
• It could be considered rational to include fears when people make decisions;
  
  
• There may be a sense in which the aggregate effect of lay opinion is more rational eg by acknowledging the possibility of 'surprise' from problems as yet unknown;

• This seemed like a contradiction in terms, as scientific framings and judgements generally have tacit ethical or political dimensions, and people do have very real concerns about such matters;
  
  
• Some concerns were certainly scientific. For example environmental impact was quoted as a concern that some scientists eg in the USA seemed to disregard as irrational, and this had reduced the amount of ecological monitoring;
  
  
• The statement might have more validity if the words 'risk of' were deleted;

• An enormous volume of work showed this simply wasn't true. Whatever study methods were used, if you asked people whether you can eliminate all risks, people will say 'no', and accept that risk is acceptable depending on the surrounding conditions;
  
  
• A rider to this might be that when people don't trust something they tend to look for zero risk, and media headlines tend to reflect this; while also when there is trust, people tend to act as if there were zero risk;
  
  
• This leads on to consideration of what the public expects from regulation;
  
  
• A consistent thread in responses might be lack of adequate testing on long-term effects, which would be for reasonable safety, rather than zero risk; there was a concern over 'unreasonable haste';

• When asked, people give very sceptical views about the media, which probably have influence in complex ways; though the assumption of influence by the media is intuitively sensible, forty years of mass communication research has not produced definitive conclusions;
  
  
• The media may be tending to concentrate on individual cases, which may be very atypical, but get huge publicity; there has been a sea change in the way media report the world, but how people make their own linkages is complex;
  
  
  
• American news media may have 'mainstreamed' Government and industry views, and give less exposure to NGO and contrary views;
  
  
• Studies of reporting the GM controversy in 1999 suggested that reporting by news journalists tended to dominate over input from scientific journalists; and studies of reporting 'Dolly' the sheep over a couple of weeks showed that reporting moved from Dolly to discussions about cloning humans, particularly about powerful and 'bad' characters from history - expressing the sentiment 'if this, then what next…?';
  
  
• There were suggestions that there might be little direct long term effect of stories eg comparing interviews just before February 1999 and six months later, there were few direct references to Putzsai;
  
  
• Media editors regard their reporting as being influenced by being part of a self-regulating media community, with its own social control mechanisms;
  
  
• Several things need to come together for issues to take off as media stories; in particular, to resonate publicly, stories needed to touch on already existent, if latent, public concerns;
  
  
• Media coverage was initially largely supportive of biotechnology in the early 1990s;
  
  
• It seemed that 'establishment' scientists have often not wanted to engage in debate, which inevitably affected how issues were reported;
  
  
• Unlike with biotechnology reporting, there is much more ability to discuss diverging views in economics, with richness of debate rather than polarisation into views being characterised as 'right' and 'wrong';

• NGOs tend only to continue with campaigns which resonate with people and are therefore effective - other issues disappear or are dropped;
  
  
• It might be difficult to generalise about NGOs, and they had also tended to use science more over the years;
  
  
• Peoples' perception of NGOs depended on what information the latter were providing;