Do the Public's Opinions of GMOs correlate to their opinions on scientific research?

Hello readers!

For this post I want to share a series of visuals I put together for another project I was working on. The overall goal of these visuals was to show the relationship between the public's opinions regarding the safety of GM foods and their opinions on continuing research in regards to these foods. If you are like me, you would guess that those in favor of GMOs would generally support their research and development and those against GMOs would probably be on the more cautious side of their testing and development, but what I found instead really surprised me.

Before we dive in, I should first note what and where the data that was used to create the following visuals came from. It was collected during a 2014 Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults about science issues. The survey was conducted with a sample of 2,002 adults throughout all 50 United States and the District of Columbia. Questions asked included views on climate change, energy issues, genetically modified foods, and bio-medical issues, as well as questions to measure science knowledge.

Without further ado, here are the graphics:

With this first visual, I wanted to get a good overall sense of how the general public felt about the safety of GM foods. To break down this data, I chose to compare the different beliefs of GM Foods, generally safe, generally unsafe, or didn't know/refused, against population in regards to urban, suburban, or rural (these designations were achieved by self-reported zip codes) geographic areas. From my general experience of talking to people at home on the farm and on campus, I noticed that those closer to agriculture seemed to be more accepting of GM foods, presumably because they produce them by the tons of bushels each year, and so I assumed that this trend would also appear in this data. However, I was very wrong. As you can see, opinions differed by less than a percentage point in each category for each different population group. This got me curious, so I analyzed the data a little further.

For my second graph, my main goal was to see what the correlation was between those who felt GM foods were safe or unsafe and how much trust these same people had in the scientists who were testing these foods. To do this I questioned these people, in two separate groups respectively, on whether or not they thought scientists have a clear understanding of the health effects of genetically modified foods. I did this because it would probably be assumed that those who think GM foods are safe also think scientists understand the health effects of GM foods. The green people on the left of Figure 2 represent those who think GM foods were generally safe as shown in Figure 1. The red people on the right of Figure 2 represent those who think GM foods were generally unsafe as shown in Figure 1. Within each of these two groups, the people are broken down into shades of green or red based on their response to whether or not they thought scientists have a clear understanding of the health effects of genetically modified foods. The major thing to point out about this graph is that about 65%  of the people who think GM foods are safe also think that scientists do not have a clear understanding of the health effects of genetically modified foods (the medium-green colored people). How can this be?? The fact that people who think GM foods are safe but don't think scientists understand the health affects brings up a few very serious questions: Are these people's opinions based off evidence? If so, is the evidence from credible scientific work? The same scientists' work who the public doesn't think understands the health affects? Or rather are their opinions created from emotion? On to the third graph. Don't be too intimidated at first.

For my third figure, I wanted to conclude by tying the information from Figures 1 and 2 to the idea that some groups may support more government investment in research than others. For example, I would have guessed that the people who thought GM foods were unsafe and scientists did not understand their health effects would generally agree that investments in scientific research aren’t worth it. To do this I, looked at the total number of people who answered “Investments do pay off in the long run” and “Investments aren’t worth it” and broke those categories down into the same groups used in Figure 2: People who believe GM foods are unsafe and think scientists do understand their health effects, People who believe GM foods are unsafe and think scientists do not understand their health effects, People who believe GM foods are safe and think scientists do understand their health effects, and People who believe GM foods are safe and think scientists do not understand their health effects. I think the really important thing to take out of this last figure is that out of all the people who answered the surveys, no matter their opinions regarding GMOs, most of them believe that long-term investments in scientific research will pay off in the long run. The implication of this is that the people are willing to keep an open mind to the development of new technologies, including GMOs.

So now that we know how much power the public's opinions really have and how this correlates to both agriculture and future research, we can explore the meat of the issue: what causes people to feel so strongly, in either direction, for or against GMOs. Is it politics? Is it personal background? Stay tuned for the next post to find out.