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://bit.ly/deCBp5 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 [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nmRUwLV8ZI 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) as well as 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. Such a result indicates that our participants understood our movie and learned from it. Moreover we obtain the same effect when we analyse the questions related general knowledge and with the questions in link with our film separately. The subjective knowledge also increased after watching our movie but we observe this as well with the neutral movie (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.