Attitude Change and Polarization

Abstract

A key reason for conducting public engagements around science and innovation policies is to find out what the public thinks and feels about those policies and the innovations themselves. However, some scholars have suggested deliberation can create attitude polarization, which could be a barrier to effective group decision-making and social progress. Thus, it is important to know when, if, and why processes lead to polarization. In this chapter, we examine individuals’ attitudes toward nanotechnology and describe whether and how they are impacted by the design of public engagement. We focus particularly on the degree to which individuals’ attitudes change and perhaps become more extreme, as a function of deliberation. We find that for the most part, the average of participants’ attitudes toward nanotechnological development shifted toward being slightly more cautious over the course of the semester during each study we conducted, although other significant patterns of attitude change were evident among individuals. The features of deliberation that most consistently influenced attitudes were critical thinking prompts and information formatting, such that encouraging critical thinking and presenting information in a way that presented multiple perspectives often led individuals to take on more cautious views toward nanotechnology. Other features commonly theorized as having important consequences for deliberation showed mostly no effects, and we found little evidence of attitude polarization, a phenomenon feared by many scholars who have remained skeptical of deliberation. However, the degree to which group dynamics during deliberative discussion (specifically, group homogeneity) influenced attitude change and polarization was moderated by the personality variable trait of openness . Those high in openness were the least likely to experience attitude extremitization (attitude change in the direction of becoming more extreme) in attitudinally heterogeneous groups but the most likely to experience attitude extremitization in attitudinally homogeneous groups.