The Movie

Our Human Practices project is an animated movie. The goal of this project is to promote a better understanding of Synthetic Biology. Simplification and playfulness are intended to reach a wide audience. Take a look...

Results of the survey

To measure the impact of our movie, we created a survey with the help of a social psychologist (Vincent Pillaud, UNIL). We set up two different situations, one in which we have presented our film and one with a neutral film. We assessed the attitude of people and their knowledge (subjective and objective) before and after watching the film, as well as their emotions (order counterbalanced) and their judgement of the movies. 190 students participated voluntarily in this study (M age = 21.6 years).

Our movie increases the objective knowledge

We took into account two kinds of knowledge: the subjective knowledge and the objective knowledge. The subjective knowledge refers to a self-evaluation of knowledge whereas the objective knowledge refers to specific knowledge. The subjective knowledge was assessed through a scale ranging from 0 (no knowledge) to 100 (excellent knowledge). The objective knowledge is based on 12 questions about synthetic biology, 8 about general knowledge (for example “in Synthetic Biology, you insert genes to cells”) and 4 about knowledge in link with the film (for example “We can find populations of bacteria in the gut of mosquitoes”). In order to test the effect of our film of those two variables, we asked the same questions before and after the movie. A good answer counted for 1 point, an error for 0 point. The total was scaled to 100 (Figure 1). The results indicate a significant increase for the participants who saw our film whereas this wasn’t observed for the participants who saw the neutral film. Statistically, we tested the interaction between the type of film and the difference in knowledge (after minus before seeing the film). We obtained F (1,188) = 13.53, p <.001 for this analysis. Such a result indicates that our participants understood our movie and learned from it. Moreover, we obtain the same effect when we only consider the questions related to general knowledge and with the questions in link with our film separately. Respectively, we obtained F (1,188) = 9.87, p = .002 and F (1,188) = 6.06, p = .015. The subjective knowledge also increased after watching our movie but we observe this as well with the neutral movie (Figure 2). The interaction between the difference in subjective knowledge and the type of film lead to a marginal effect, F (1,188) = 3.20, p = .075.

Figure 1 Objective knowledge. Measured with questions about Synthetic Biology.

Figure 2 Subjective knowledge. Self-evaluation of participants.

Our movie leads to a negative attitude change toward synthetic biology

We assessed both their positive and negative attitudes about Synthetic Biology separately according to the method of Kaplan, 1972. This allowed us to evaluate the different aspects in the attitude of the subject one could consider: they can evaluate synthetic biology as promising as well as potentially dangerous or having harmful effects at the same time. The results indicate that the positive attitude tends to decrease after watching the movie (Figure 3). We observe a similar effect with a neutral film. This inference was made as we observed a main effect of attitude change, F (1,188) = 53.23, p <.001 but no interaction of this difference with the type of film, F (1,188) <1, ns. However, our iGEM movie has no effect on the negative attitude, F (1,188) <1, ns. (Figure 4).

Figure 3 Positive attitude. How positive, favorable, beneficial is Synthetic Biology when taking into account only positive, favorable, beneficial aspects. Scale from 1 to 12.

Figure 4 Negative attitude. How negative, harmful, unfavorable is Synthetic Biology when taking into account only negative, harmful, unfavourable aspects. Scale from 1 to 12.

In order to understand this change in behaviour we compared it with the evaluation of the film, where we asked if the film was serious, scientific and/or interesting, each on a scale from 1 (not) to 5 (extremely). We used the sum of the grades that range from 3 to 15. Interestingly, we found out that there is an influence of this evaluation on how the attitude changes (Figure 7).

Figure 7 Changes in negative attitude in function of the evaluation of our film by the population. As the evaluation of the movie increases, the negative attitude becomes less negative

Emotions tend to become slightly more negative

We were also interested in emotions that could be triggered by the movie. We asked the participants to indicate the extent to which they feel scared, nervous, afraid (negative emotions), interested, alert and enthusiastic (positive emotions) toward Synthetic Biology. These 6 items were taken from the Watson & Tellegen, PANAS, 1988. We observe a similar decrease in the positive emotion for both movies (Figure 5). We observe a similar decrease in the positive emotion for both movies (Figure 5), F (1,188) = 9.97, p = .002. We observed anyway a small but significant increase in negative emotions triggered by our movie, F (1,188) = 4.76, p = .03 (Figure 6).

Figure 5 Positive emotions. Measured by an evaluation of how interested, enthusiastic and alert participants felt.

Figure 6 Negative emotions. Measured by an evaluation of how scared, nervous and afraid participants felt.

Discussion of the results

This study showed that we could significantly increase the knowledge of people about our project and synthetic biology by showing our movie. In addition we could see how the perception of the film (as scientific and serious) is important for a change in the attitude of people. Only people, who evaluated the movie as serious, scientific and interesting, had a more positive attitude after watching the film.
Our results were quite expected if we look at other studies in the literature about genetic manipulations, like cloning or genetically modified organisms. It confirms that even when people understand the subject, this is not necessarily accompanied by an increase in positive attitude regarding the subject. Rather, more knowledge can make people more cautious and nervous, even though the population tends to support some very promising and needed applications of bioengineering.
Concerning our finding that a change in attitude seems to be rather difficult to achieve by showing a playful movie we should say that we do not think that sceptical behaviour of people towards synthetic biology is necessarily a bad thing, which needs to be changed. The important thing is rather to make people more aware about dangers and benefits of genetic manipulations. We should advocate rational thinking and an ethical debate, which can usually hardly keep up with the constantly growing technical and scientific progress.