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 [http://macssp4123b.unil.ch/vpillaud/start survey] with the help of a psychologist (Vincent Pillaud). The idea was to have a control group which was shown a "neutral" movie [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nmRUwLV8ZI] (with no scientific impact) and a second group to whom we showed our movie. Questions about Synthetic Biology were asked before and after watching the movies.

Our movie increases the objective knowledge

There are two kinds of knowledge we are interested in: the subjective knowledge and the objective knowledge. The subjective knowledge is the grade that people give to themselves, it is a measure of what they think they know about synthetic biology, on a scale from 0 to 100. The objective knowledge is based on 12 questions that test the knowledge of people before and after the movie. Each question gives 1 point if it is correct or 0 if it is not. The total was scaled to 100 (Figure 1). The results show that the objective knowledge significantly increased after watching our movie whereas the neutral movie did not help to answer the questions. That means that people understood this movie and learned from it. Moreover we get the same pattern when we analyse the questions related to synthetic biology in general (8 questions) and the questions related to our project (4 questions) separately. The subjective knowledge also increased after watching our movie but so did it for the neutral control (Figure 2).

Figure 1 Objective knowledge

Figure 2 Subjective knowledge

Our movie does not change the attitude of the viewer towards Synthetic Biology

We asked the viewers to both evaluate their positive and negative feelings about Synthetic Biology. This allowed us to evaluate the different aspects of the subject one could consider: promising as well as potentially dangerous or harmful effects at the same time.

The results tell us that the positive attitude tends to decrease (Figue 3). But we see that the neutral video decreases it even more so we cannot say that it is due to the talk about synthetic biology. We see that our iGEM movie has no effect on the negative attitude (Figure 4).

Figure 3 Positive attitude

Figure 4 Negative attitude

Emotions tend to become slightly more negative

We were also interested in emotions that could be triggered by the movie. So we asked people how much they feel scared, nervous, afraid (negative emotion), interested, alert, enthusiastic (positive emotion). We see that the positive emotions decrease for both movies (Figure 5), but we see a little but significant increase in negative emotions that was triggered by our movie (Figure 6).

Figure 5 Positive emotions

Figure 6 negative emotions

Theses results are quiet 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 these subjects. Rather, more knowledge can make people more cautious and nervous, even if the population tends to support some very promising and needed applications of bioengineering.