Opinion
Fatal attraction: the intuitive appeal of GMO opposition

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Highlights

  • People tend to rely on intuitive reasoning to make a judgment on GMOs.

  • This intuitive reasoning includes folk biology, teleological and intentional intuitions and disgust.

  • Anti-GMO activists have exploited intuitions successfully to promote their cause.

  • Intuitive judgments steer people away from sustainable solutions.

Public opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) remains strong. By contrast, studies demonstrate again and again that GM crops make a valuable contribution to the development of a sustainable type of agriculture. The discrepancy between public opinion and the scientific evidence requires an explanation. We argue that intuitive expectations about the world render the human mind vulnerable to particular misrepresentations of GMOs. We explain how the involvement of particular intuitions accounts for the popularity, persistence, and typical features of GM opposition and tackle possible objections to our approach. To conclude, we discuss the implications for science education, science communication, and the environmental movement.

Section snippets

Explaining public opposition to GMOs

Concerns about health, environmental, and socioeconomic hazards have resulted in a strong public opposition to GMOs 1, 2, 3. These worries tend to have a large impact on national and international policies. For instance, in India, the government suspended the culture of Bacillus thuringiensis-engineered Solanum melongena (Bt brinjal), despite initial approval for commercialization [4]. In Europe, the lack of public support for GMOs has led to a de facto moratorium within the EU on new GM crops

An intuitive understanding of GMOs

Although generally we feel as if we control willfully what we think and do, much of our thinking depends on intuitions, of which the working largely stays below the radar of conscious awareness [14]. Among other things, these intuitions, which evolved in response to particular adaptive situations, automatically shape expectations about the world or induce reflexive risk assessments [15]. Under ecologically relevant conditions, these intuitions tend to generate rational responses [16] but, when

Folk biology

The human mind intuitively understands how the biological world functions. One constituent of this folk biology is psychological essentialism [25] that amounts to the belief that organisms hold an unobservable, immutable core determining their identity and, thus, their development and behavior. Psychological essentialism makes sense evolutionarily because it allows individuals to categorize automatically the biological world. As such, valuable information becomes immediately available, enabling

How the opposition to GMOs does – and does not – take shape

Some representations are more popular than others. The popularity of a representation is determined by the relevance of the information it purveys. Whether information is relevant depends on its ability to capture attention and the ease by which the mind can process it. The more information is in line with our intuitive expectations, the more easily it is apprehended, remembered, and, thus, communicated. Because intuitions are universally shared, appropriate representations stand a greater

Concluding remarks and implications

The human mind comprises evolved intuitions that shape and constrain cultural preferences. In the case of GMOs, folk biology, religious intuitions, and emotions such as disgust leave the mind readily seduced by representations of GMOs as abnormal or toxic. By pointing out how public aversion to GMOs thrives on such preferences, it is understandable why people continue to resort systematically to concerns about GMOs that are scientifically unsubstantiated. With such a perspective that is not

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr Martine De Cock for help in preparing the manuscript and Thom Scott-Phillips for the helpful remarks. This work was supported by the Ghent University Multidisciplinary Research Partnership ‘Sustainable BioEconomy’ (Project 01MRB510W) and Ghent University grant BOF13/24J/089.

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