Consumers' perceptions and acceptance of genome editing in agriculture: Insights from the United States of America and Switzerland.

The terms "New Genomic Techniques" (NGTs) or "Genome Editing" refer to various methods that allow finding, cleaving, and repairing specific sequences in the genome. These techniques could contribute to managing various challenges in plant breeding and agriculture. Aside from regulatory uncertainties, the lack of consumer acceptance has frequently been cited as a significant barrier to the widespread use of NGTs in plant breeding and agriculture across the planet. This study was based on an anonymous online survey (N = 1202). It investigated what consumers from two countries that differ in gene technology regulation, namely the United States of America and Switzerland, thought about three specific applications of NGTs in plant breeding (i.e., blight-resistant potato, gluten-free wheat, cold-resistant soybean). The study highlights the importance of the affect heuristic for acceptance, as half of the participants in both countries expressed positive feelings regarding the three applications, a quarter of the participants expressed negative, and the remaining participants expressed torn or neutral emotions. Some evidence was provided that the regulatory context might have acted as a risk cue, as participants in Switzerland expressed more negative feelings, perceptions, and lower acceptance than participants from the United States of America. Lastly, our findings underscore the importance of a collaboration between the life sciences and social sciences in balancing technological innovations and public perceptions and acceptance, which have been shown in this study to be impacted by affect, values, and context.

I think, therefore I act, Revisited: Building a stronger foundation for risk analysis.

Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) is a thinking style in which people engaged in judgment and decision-making actively seek out and then evaluate information in a manner that is intentionally disconnected from their prior beliefs and motivations and in line with self-perceptions of autonomy. Actively open-minded thinkers have been observed to make both more accurate judgments about the magnitude of risks and more evidence-based decisions under uncertainty in a wide range of situations such as climate change and politics. In addition, actively open-minded thinkers functioning in domains where they lack a desired level of knowledge are open to "outsourcing" the job of critical reasoning thinking to credible experts; in other words, they are better able to gauge who is trustworthy and then rely on the insights of these trustworthy others to help them reach a conclusion. We report results from a follow-up to research previously published in Risk Analysis that confirms these tenets in the context of COVID-19. We then extend these results to offer a series of recommendations for strengthening the process and outcomes of risk analysis: leveraging the latent norm of autonomy and personal agency that underpins AOT, activating or engaging with approaches to reasoning-such as decision structuring-that are in line with AOT, and working upstream and downstream of risk analysis to establish AOT as a norm of its own.

I Think, Therefore I Act: The Influence of Critical Reasoning Ability on Trust and Behavior During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) operates in three dimensions: it serves as a norm accounting for how one should search for and use information in judgment and decision making; it is a thinking style that one may adopt in accordance with the norm; and it sets standards for evaluating the thinking of others, particularly the trustworthiness of sources that claim authority. With the first and third dimensions in mind, we explore how AOT influences trust in public health experts, risk perceptions, and compliance with recommended behaviors aimed at slowing the spread and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using survey data from a nationally representative sample of Americans (N = 857), we tested whether AOT will lead people to place greater trust public health experts (H1). Because these experts have been consistently messaging that COVID-19 is a real and serious threat to public health, we also hypothesized that trust in experts would be positively associated with high perceived risk (H2), which should have a positive influence on (self-reported) compliance with CDC recommendations (H3). And because AOT is a self-directed thinking style, we also expected it to directly influence risk perceptions and, by extension, compliance (H4). Our results support all four hypotheses. We discuss the implications of these results for how risk communication and risk management efforts are designed and practiced.