Abstract
Introduction
In the field of public understanding of science, the public's understanding of science has been one important line of research (Bauer and Jensen, 2011). The discourses of public understanding of science have moved from people's ‘deficit’ in scientific knowledge and attitudes to science, to deficit in trust in scientists and institutions (Bauer, 2009). Many policies and activities have been implemented to improve the public's understanding.
At the same time, the increasing development and wide diffusion of social media among the public have provided opportunities for research on people's understanding of science. The exponential growth of social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Sina Weibo has raised the possibility of detecting public opinion on scientific issues. The abundance of data available from social media includes internet users’ expressions of feelings and thoughts about a variety of issues and has greatly benefited researchers’ social inquiries. Meanwhile, the research community has developed accessible open-source text analysis libraries in R, Python and other programming languages to facilitate analyses of big data (Munzert et al. 2014; Wilkerson and Casas 2017).
In line with such trends, in the past decade we have seen a proliferation of literature on using social media to measure public opinion. In the area of science communication, one of the persistent concerns is always about the public's opinions on science and technology, and specifically on controversial scientific issues. For example, Veltri (2013) investigated public opinion about nanotechnology on Twitter by analysing 24,000 tweets in terms of web metrics, latent semantic and sentiment analysis. In another study on public perception of nuclear power, Kugo et al. (2005) used text mining methods to analyse online public comments regarding high-level radioactive waste disposal. In the public health area, based on the study of tweets, Chew and Eysenbach (2010) investigated public reactions during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Drawing on a huge volume of texts posted by the public on social media platforms, these authors found that such texts can be useful data for detecting the public's opinions.
Nevertheless, alongside enthusiasm for understanding public opinion from texts posted on social media, there are challenges in such studies. One of the most important problems is that users on social media do not seem to represent the overall population (Gayo-Avello, 2011; Mislove et al. 2011). Therefore, it is necessary to integrate traditional research methods, such as quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews, and data collected from the traditional mass media such as newspapers, to complement web data and thus achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the public.
This special issue of Cultures of Science addresses public understanding of controversial scientific issues, in particular genetically modified organisms (GMOs), in the context of China. The papers aim to answer the following questions: What are the Chinese public's perceptions of and attitudes to GMOs? What are the key determinants affecting the public's understanding of this issue? How have GMOs been portrayed in social media, as well as in the mainstream media in China and beyond? The papers examine the relevant societal, organizational and individual factors in identifying the construction of public understanding.
The public's perceptions of and attitudes towards GMOs
Since two decades ago, the issue of GMOs has attracted the public's attention in China. People's perceptions of and attitudes to this controversial issue have shifted in those years. The proportion of the public thinking that GMOs are unsafe increased from 13% in 2002 to 45% in 2012 (Huang and Peng, 2015). Therefore, it is imperative for the research community to explore the changing scenario of public perceptions of GMOs in recent years, especially the underlying mentality and mindset of stakeholders in genetic engineering.
In ‘Imagining GMOs: the Chinese public's scientific perception in the digital age’, Xu and Lu conducted an exploratory study through interviewing both GMO opponents and supporters, aiming to examine the Chinese public's perceptions and attitudes to GMOs from both sides. Drawing on their interview data, they found that the public tended to see GMOs from a risk framework, which consists of panic about scientific uncertainty, concerns about food safety, and conspiracy theories. Moreover, the public's perception of risk seemed to reinforce people's negative attitudes towards GMOs.
Factors that affect public understanding of GMOs
Media, as crucial sources of scientific information for the public, have been playing increasingly significant roles in constructing public perceptions of and attitudes towards scientific issues. Disputed issues such as GMOs are no exception.
In ‘One issue, different stories: The construction of GMO issues on Chinese, American and British mainstream media portals’, Ruan, Yang and Jin employed framing theory and a comparative perspective to investigate the media presentation of GMO issues by examining how those issues were covered on the media. The authors selected influential news media from China (People's Daily), the United States (The New York Times) and the United Kingdom (The Guardian) as sample media outlets and collected 749 pieces of news on GMO issues from 2008 to 2015. Through analysing the underlying sentiments and frames in that coverage, they found that news coverage of GMOs in those three countries seemed to reveal similar frames, including factual, human interest, conflict and regulation frames. Despite those similarities in frames, the sentiments underlying the frames tended to be different among countries.
In addition to finding out how media construct scientific issues, scholars are also curious about the ways in which media usage influences the public's attitudes to and behaviours regarding controversial scientific issues.
In ‘How the Chinese public makes decisions about controversial technologies: A case study on GMOs’, by surveying 1,235 Chinese residents, You attempted to answer such questions as: How does new media content, including online news, WeChat information and Sina Weibo posts, influence public attitudes? How does scientific knowledge directly and indirectly affect public attitudes? How do risk perception, institutional trust and trust in scientists influence public attitudes and behaviours? She found that people's scientific literacy had a positive impact on their attitudes to and behaviours regarding GMOs as well as their trust in institutions and scientists. Moreover, she found that new media usage (especially WeChat), which provided channels for acquiring GMO-related information, was significantly related to the public's knowledge of and attitudes to this controversial technology.
At the individual level, it is crucial to investigate what factors affect the public's perception of and attitudes towards GMOs, considering the roles that individual perceptions and attitudes play in affecting the public's behaviours.
In ‘Why do intuitions differ? Explaining how individual and scenario features influence disgust and moral judgements on GMOs’, Liu, Gao and Zhu attempted to examine the underlying intuitions and emotions of disgust for GMOs from the moral psychology perspective with two interrelated experimental studies. More specifically, they investigated how individual and scenario features influence individuals’ disgust and moral judgement about GMOs. Their experiments revealed the dynamics of disgust influencing individuals’ moral judgement and demonstrated the role of scenario factors (disgust elicitation types, emotion reappraisal) and individual factors consisting of trait disgust and moral preferences.
The diffusion of GMO-related information on social media
Text has always been an important data source in public opinion research. Social media has provided public opinion researchers with more data than their predecessors could have imagined. Meanwhile, there have been increasing numbers of software packages for accessing and processing large-scale data. As a result, research on public opinion by analysing text data extracted from social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Sina Weibo has become increasingly popular among public opinion researchers.
To explore the evolving trajectories of public opinion on GMOs in China, in ‘The evolution of online discussion about GMOs in China over the past decade: Changes, causes and characteristics’, Li, Luo and Chen chose to analyse texts posted on a popular microblogging platform, Sina Weibo, in China. They wrote their own crawler program to retrieve posts that related to the term ‘GM’ and collected 886,837 posts produced by Chinese users from 2009 to 2018. After they analysed the texts with descriptive statistics and semantic network analysis, they could reveal and summarise the characteristics and trends of discourses on GMOs. They found that, in line with intuitive observation, dominant public discourses on GMO issues were not static; on the contrary, they have been dynamically changing over time. Moreover, the changes in public opinion seemed to reflect various intertwined factors, such as the public's trust in the government and the role of opinion leaders.
Similarly, in ‘Misinformation and disinformation in science: Examining the social diffusion of rumours about GMOs’, Jiang and Fang also studied texts posted on Sina Weibo to examine misinformation and disinformation in science. More specifically, they employed the case study method to explore the dynamics of the diffusion of rumours about GM soybeans causing cancer. In addition to demonstrating how rumours were created strategies used to distort information and spread rumours on the social media platform, the authors also found that offline social realities were reflected in the online discussions and at the same time greatly shaped the focus of those discussions. That is, people's online expressions of panic and anxiety were essentially a reflection of their offline concerns about social injustice and class conflicts, among other things.
In summary, the articles in this issue provide a comprehensive perspective on understanding the public's understanding of GMOs in China. These studies, conducted with multiple methods (including quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews, experiments and text analysis), will shed light on research on the public's understanding of controversial issues such as GMOs, climate change, nuclear power and so on for researchers from other countries. However, we should be cautious when generalizing certain findings of these studies to other types of controversial scientific issues conducted in other countries, given the complexity of some issues and cultural and social differences among different societies.