This book is about two major technological advances: public perception of new materials engineered at the molecular level with astounding properties and the development of new techniques in the study of human behavior that are revolutionizing how we research human behavior and attitudes. The first of these goes by the broad term nanotechnology, while the second goes by many names but has been popularized primarily under the mantle of behavioral economics . Each of these technological advances has reached the general public in just the last 20 years, with their broad adoption occurring only in the past decade. Each is on the cusp of revolutionizing industries and fields in ways that will transform them for decades to come. Each is controversial and carries its own risks along with its opportunities.
Using recent advances in the study of human behavior to consider how people understand and perceive nanotechnology provides us with a richer and more actionable set of insights into public perceptions of this exciting new technology. At the same time, using public perceptions of nanotechnology to explore the potential of new methods of studying human behavior provides us with a case study in the power of these techniques. It demonstrates their capacity to produce insights that are not only more valid and have a greater capacity to explain human perception and action but also more useful to people who need to communicate with publics about new technologies and set regulations for those technologies. This book takes on both of these tasks, offering readers an example of how to study public perception and communication of new technologies as well as a set of robust actionable insights into public perceptions and communication of nanotechnology in particular.
Nanotechnology has been a serious field of scientific and technological research for more than 30 years, but only in the past decade has it gained much public attention. In short, nanotechnology refers to “the ability to control and restructure the matter at the atomic and molecular levels in the range of approximately 1 nm to 100 nm, and exploiting the distinct properties and phenomena at that scale” (Roco 2011, p. 428). Nanotechnology derives its name from its size, measured in nanometers (nm), which are 10–9 meters. Conceptualizing something this tiny can be difficult, requiring comparisons to the smallest things people see and encounter on a daily basis. For example, a human hair is roughly 90,000 nm thick, and there are over 25 million nanometers in an inch. When we try to think about something 100 nm in size, we are trying to imagine something much smaller than most of us have ever seen, even through a microscope. Germs are typically about 1000 nm, and red blood cells tend to be about 8000 nm in diameter. So, if something must be between 1 nm and 100 nm to qualify as a nanotechnology, it has to be no larger than one-tenth the size of a germ and one-eightieth the size of a red blood cell.
As fantastic as it may sound to think that we could engineer technologies at such a tiny scale, most of us use technologies manufactured at the nanoscale every day. Modern computers and smartphones include processors that were manufactured with processes that boast levels of precision ranging from 10 nm to 32 nm, and have been manufactured at the 90 nm or smaller scale since 2004. However, some researchers do not consider these processors true examples of nanotechnology. While there are advantages to making processors with these finer levels of precision, nanotechnology researchers argue that they do not “exploit the distinct properties and phenomena” that occur when you make particles so incredibly small.
Instead, Michael Roco (2011) and others prefer to reserve the term nanotechnology for materials like carbon nanotubes, which can be built with a wide variety of unique and sometimes astounding capacities depending on their shape and form. As the name implies, these are nanoscale tubes made of carbon atoms. They can be made incredibly strong and stiff, perhaps being the strongest material yet invented while still being quite light. How well they conduct electricity and heat can be manipulated by using a different pattern of carbon atoms to form the walls of the tube, some promising conductivity hundreds of times greater than copper. These kinds of properties are possible only because of manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular level that exploits the possibilities that emerge at such a small scale.
In the past decade, these materials have gradually worked their way into almost every segment of consumer products. Sports equipment like golf clubs and baseball bats now sometimes include carbon nanofibers to make them stronger and more durable. Some paints include nanomaterials made from titanium dioxide to reduce how much heat they absorb, make them easier to clean, or less flammable. A wide variety of materials are manufactured in nanoscale and incorporated into products, including silver nanomaterials, because, at the nanoscale, silver has antibacterial properties. Nanoscale titanium dioxide has also been a very popular addition to sunscreens and cosmetics, because it not only provides good protection against sun exposure but also, at the nanoscale, tends to refract light like a prism, giving the effect of a glow or sheen. In recent years, some food packaging has been manufactured with nanomaterials that slow bacterial growth or make the packaging stronger.
Yet, for all its potential and even with the widespread adoption of nanomaterials in consumer products, public awareness remains quite limited. Most people display little knowledge about nanotechnology and are unaware that the products they use contain nanomaterials. The government has sponsored numerous public events and information campaigns about the technology, and researchers have been exploring public perceptions for many years. All the same, even for all its promise and its ubiquity in our daily lives, most people are neither excited about nanotechnology nor concerned about their exposure to it.
Most of the data we have about public understanding and perception of nanotechnology comes from survey research , some of which was conducted at or following public engagement events on the topic. While that data has been helpful in drawing a baseline picture of diverse publics and how they have (or have not) encountered and responded to these emerging technologies, we have very little research that reflects the paradigm revolution happening in the methods of studying human behavior.
Thanks to popular books by academics like Daniel Kahneman (2011) and Steven Levitt (Levitt and Dubner 2005), behavioral economics has been featured in popular magazines, national and local newspapers, radio and television shows, and countless blogs and podcasts. While much of that work comes from economists (like Levitt), psychologists like Kahneman have also been key to revolutionizing economic theory. In fact, Kahneman is the first PhD in psychology to ever win the Nobel Prize in economics, which he received in 2002 for his work with Amos Tversky on behavioral economics.
What Kahneman, Tversky, Levitt, and others in this revolution share is a focus on the empirical study of human behavior as it actually occurs (rather than as it occurs in a laboratory setting or should occur in an assumed world of rational choice, perfect information, or similar counter-factual conditions). That focus is certainly not new, and certain branches of psychology and other social sciences have sought such a turn since almost the beginning of the social sciences themselves. As Adam Lerner and I documented in our recent book (Lerner and Gehrke 2018), the origins of the current revolution in the study of human behavior can be traced back to the human ecology movement and the Chicago school of sociology in the 1920s. Throughout the twentieth century, various strains of ecological thinking have resisted social science’s previously dominant paradigm of relying upon laboratory experiments, tightly controlled environments, and survey data. Yet, the true paradigm shift in the study of human behavior did not begin until those same tightly controlled laboratory experiments demonstrated their own insufficiency. Since the 1990s, and especially in the most recent two decades, researchers in cognitive psychology, economics, education, jurisprudence, political science, and nearly every other social scientific discipline have demonstrated that humans are not predominantly rational actors, often affected not only by their own emotions and biographies but also by elements of their environment ranging from the most overt influences to the most subtle cues. Efforts to explain away these findings with theories of rational actors, logical choice, deliberative principles, or complex motivations do little more than build precarious paper houses that topple under the lightest breeze of scrutiny.
However, for all their revelations about the myriad nonrational elements in human behavior and even with their frequent findings that people’s choices and actions are strongly influenced by factors like scene and setting, or medium of communication, or perceived outcomes, behavioral economists still sometimes deploy laboratory research methods where the scene, setting, medium of communication, or perceived outcomes are contrived and deviate from the world in which research subjects actually act.
The irony is, and this is true in a wide variety of social sciences, that their research outcomes frequently ...