ABSTRACT

Emerging technologies such as nanotechnologies provide a unique opportunity to examine perceptions or judgments (Slovic, 1987) of technological risk and benefit as they are being socially and culturally produced, rather than retroactively. This chapter explores such “upstream” formative perceptions through six U.S. deliberative workshops conducted in California in 2009, informed by a prior 2007 Center for Nanotechnology in Society U.S./UK deliberation study. In both studies, participants deliberated the potential risks and benefits of nanotechnologies for either health/human enhancement or energy/the environment, to allow for controlled comparison of response to these different “application domains.” We argue that, as participants interpreted workshop discussion points and materials, they drew on their understanding and values regarding health or environment/energy domains more broadly, including cultural knowledge about environmental and energy concerns, technological innovations, and the health industry, which impacted their risk and benefit perceptions of nanotechnology. In other words, application context affects public risk/benefit perceptions not because of the use of the technology per se, but because of the ideas and values tied to that application domain more broadly. The social issues of 1) urgency and necessity; 2) novelty; 3) regulation; 4) equitable distribution of benefits and risks; 5) privacy; and 6) responsibility are identified in this paper as particularly salient in influencing differing responses to application domain. These issues are operationalized as axes to allow for conceptualization of a multi-scalar model of emergent public responses to nanotechnologies.