by Douglas Vakoch - Social Scientist / Principal Investigator
Recently, the SETI Institute conducted an informal online survey to show some of the steps psychologists and sociologists can take when doing research on SETI. As we noted in an earlier article, there are many ways that online surveys fail to meet the standards for rigorous scientific research. Nevertheless, Internet surveys have one strong selling point: if they are examined closely, they can provide a very concrete sense of the steps that social scientists take when conducting real studies under more controlled conditions. With the goal of gaining insight into the process of doing social scientific work on SETI, we will delve more deeply into the specific items used in our online questionnaire.
In a cross-cultural study that psychologist Yuh-shiow Lee and I conducted several years ago, we looked at the attitudes of college students towards the possibility that extraterrestrial life might exist. And if it does, what it might be like for people to learn that it exists. We surveyed students at universities in Hong Kong and the United States with the same questions that were included in our online survey. (In fact, we asked many more questions in the original survey, but to avoid taxing the patience of volunteer Internet respondents, the online survey used only a subset of the items from the original study.)
In that study of Chinese and American views, Lee and I created several new sets of questionnaire items that would let us examine beliefs about extraterrestrial life. In this article, Ill describe one of those "scales," or sets of items that we described in more detail in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica.
Before we make contact with life beyond Earth, one of the most basic questions we can ask about ET life is "does it exist?" In our online survey, we included seven items to tap into this broader question. For each statement, the respondents indicated the degree to which they agreed or disagreed.
The reason that these seven items are grouped into the same scale is simple: the answers that people give to one statement tend to be closely related to their answers to the other statements. That doesnt mean that they will either agree or disagree to all the items. In fact, as a general rule, the responses to the last three items tend to be the opposite of the responses to the first four.
Its also possible that any particular person will break this pattern. For example, someone might be highly skeptical about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but still think its very important to educate SETI scientists -- just in case ET does exist. But collectively, looking at the people who completed the survey in our original study, there is a strong pattern among the responses to the seven statements listed above.
Center of the World?
In our original study, Lee and I wanted to identify factors that influence peoples beliefs about extraterrestrial life. We hypothesized that one important variable would be how anthropocentric people are: that is, how much they view humankind as holding a privileged place in the world. Rather than starting from scratch to develop a scale of anthropocentrism, we searched the scientific literature and discovered that two other researchers had already done it.
In 1993, Edward W. Chandler and Ralph Mason Dreger published a pair of articles about anthropocentrism in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality. Dreger and Chandler had discovered many interrelated facets of anthropocentrism, and had developed scales for measuring peoples attitudes about them. For our study of attitudes about extraterrestrials, we focused on one particular factor that they discovered, which was represented in our online study by the following statements:
Making Predictions
The goal of the current survey, as noted above, is to examine some of the ways that social scientists contribute to SETI. Rather than simply tell readers the latest findings of psychologists and sociologists interested in extraterrestrial life, we want to take you through the process of research, step by step.
Now that you have learned about two of the scales we used to assess attitudes in our online survey, what do you predict about the relationship between the two scales? That is, if you know that someone thinks that life beyond Earth is very likely, can you say anything about how anthropocentric they are? What if a person thinks that Earth alone supports life? If you do hypothesize a close connection between these two scales, do you expect any exceptions to your rule -- or is it an ironclad law, with no exceptions?
Ill be following the discussion on SPACE.coms SETI Message Board to discover what our readers are hypothesizing. In the next article in this series, Ill let you know the results of our online survey, and Ill comment on some of the Message Board discussion.