Peters et al (2007). Culture and technological innovation

This is one of the greatest article I've ever read. It is enlightening both conceptually and methodologically. This study was authored by Hans Peter Peters and colleagues, who examined the impact of "institutional trust" and "appreciation of nature" on food biotechnology. Specifically, they compared the dynamics of the two factors in the context of USA and Germany.

They first explained why they study general institutional trust rather than specific trust, although trust towards specific issue or personnel responsible for that issue has been found to exert larger impact on attitudes (e.g., Siegrist & Cvetkovich, 2000 in Risk Analysis). One advantage of using general trust lies in its ability to sort out the methodological ambiguity with respect to the direction of effect. Whereas it is likely that people's level of trust affect their perception of a technology, it is equally possible that their attitudes toward the technology shape how much they trust the officials or institutions responsible for doing research or regulation about the technology.

The authors of the study conceptualize the relationship between trust and attitude by utilizing the idea of a "syndrome," which refers to "a net of concepts that are tied together and vary jointly (p.196)." Peters and colleagues argue that issue-specific trust is part of the attitudinal syndrome and is therefore inappropriate to be used as a predictor, based on the reasons outlined in the previous paragraph. General trust, however, is external to the food biotechnology attitude syndrome. Thus, if a correlation is found, the causal direction should go from general trust to attitude, but not vice versa.

They found that "appreciation of nature" was associated with attitudes towards food biotechnology in both countries. However, the different levels of appreciation results in different levels of support. Germans were found to be more appreciative of nature and therefore possessed more negative attitudes towards food biotechnology than the Americans. It should be noted that although the internal reliability of the measure of "appreciation" is not very high, it predicts the outcome very well.

Quite surprisingly, trust had a positive relationship with attitudes only in the US, not in Germany. The authors attribute the finding to several reasons.

1. The attitudes of regulatory institutions are more consistent in the US; that is, more supportive of biotechnology. However, in Germany, people saw mixed signals from the equivalent institutions. That's why trust appears to be less irrelevant in Germany.

2. The higher relevance of trust in the US also results from the "technocratic" framing of the issue, as opposed to the more "political" nature in Germany. When an issue was discussed within the technocratic discourse, its scope was restricted to the scientists and administrative realm, which rendered institutional trust more relevant in the decision making process. This point is also illustrated in the Attention Cycles and Frames in the Plant Biotechnology Debate by Nisbet and Huge.

3. The awareness of the issue also makes the Germans more likely to generate their own assessment based on the available and relevant arguments than their US counterparts.

4. Trust in institutions is a more effective mechanisms for the resolution of uncertainty in a society emphasizing individualism/ universalism than in a society emphasizing particularism/ collectivism. In the latter type of society, trust is mainly established in specific people, not impersonal actors.

In concluding, the authors suggest that the concept of trust and nature should be examined in the context of nanotechnology. They also call for studies with respect to other cultural dimensions, such as moral and religious beliefs.