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The purpose of this book is to share some results and the data from four studies in which we used experimental procedures to manipulate key features of deliberative public engagement to study the impacts in the context of deliberations about nanotechnology. In this chapter, we discuss the purpose of this book, which is to advance science of public engagement, and the overarching question motivating our research: What public engagement methods work for what purposes and why? We also briefly review existing prior work related to our overarching goal and question and introduce the contents of the rest of the book.

In this chapter we provide an overview of the experimental methods used in our four research studies. We describe the context for our studies and describe our rationale for examining our research questions in the context of the college student classroom. Then we compare and contrast the major features of our studies, including the participants, timing, materials, measures, and procedures for each study, and provide explanations for certain changes made between studies. Finally, we provide information about how readers can find our more detailed materials and methods, which also accompany our data for Studies 2–4.

This chapter examines what is associated with increases in both objective and subjective knowledge about nanotechnology as the result of participating in a public engagement. The results are replicated and compared across three different public engagements, all using undergraduate students as participants. Knowledge is examined at four different time points, allowing researchers to understand when learning is most likely occurring. Results indicate that participants showed gains in knowledge over the course of the public engagement, with the biggest gains shown after reading the materials as compared to participating in the group discussions. The structure of the materials did not directly influence knowledge gain; however, there were indirect effects of encouraging critical thinking on knowledge via cognitive engagement. These results highlight the importance of cognitive engagement to understand when learning occurs, as well as some of the opportunities that may exists for remote deliberations, given the importance of the reading materials over the discussion.

A key reason for conducting public engagements around science and innovation policies is to find out what the public thinks and feels about those policies and the innovations themselves. However, some scholars have suggested deliberation can create attitude polarization, which could be a barrier to effective group decision-making and social progress. Thus, it is important to know when, if, and why processes lead to polarization. In this chapter, we examine individuals’ attitudes toward nanotechnology and describe whether and how they are impacted by the design of public engagement. We focus particularly on the degree to which individuals’ attitudes change and perhaps become more extreme, as a function of deliberation. We find that for the most part, the average of participants’ attitudes toward nanotechnological development shifted toward being slightly more cautious over the course of the semester during each study we conducted, although other significant patterns of attitude change were evident among individuals. The features of deliberation that most consistently influenced attitudes were critical thinking prompts and information formatting, such that encouraging critical thinking and presenting information in a way that presented multiple perspectives often led individuals to take on more cautious views toward nanotechnology. Other features commonly theorized as having important consequences for deliberation showed mostly no effects, and we found little evidence of attitude polarization, a phenomenon feared by many scholars who have remained skeptical of deliberation. However, the degree to which group dynamics during deliberative discussion (specifically, group homogeneity) influenced attitude change and polarization was moderated by the personality variable trait of openness. Those high in openness were the least likely to experience attitude extremitization (attitude change in the direction of becoming more extreme) in attitudinally heterogeneous groups but the most likely to experience attitude extremitization in attitudinally homogeneous groups.

This chapter focuses on the predictors of policy acceptance and upon elucidating the pathways through which different features of public engagement might impact such acceptance—especially when a policy is not preferred. Examination of the relationships between experimentally varied features of engagement and policy acceptance suggests few, if any, main effects of different features. There is even less evidence that any of the engagement features change the relationship between policy preferences and policy acceptance. However, a more fine-grained analysis suggests a more nuanced story. There was evidence that certain features of engagement, such as promoting discussion or encouraging critical thinking, impacted mediators and moderators such as conscientious engagement and negative perceptions of the information that was provided. These mediating or moderating variables, in turn, impacted policy acceptance and/or the relationship between policy preferences and policy acceptance—sometimes in a manner that suggested competing pathways were at work, cancelling one another out, and resulting in our apparent “null effects.” Our results also varied dependent upon whether the policy context was one of relative risk (promoting the development of nanotechnology) or one of relative status quo (promoting slow development and higher regulation of nanotechnology). Thus, our results suggest a fuller understanding of the impacts of engagement features on hoped-for outcomes (like policy acceptance) requires careful attention to causal pathways that operate in different policy contexts.

In the preceding chapters, we have presented the need for a science of public engagement, the reasons we focused on feature-process-outcome connections relating to deliberative engagement, and the basis for our targeting nanotechnology/synthetic biology as the policy area concentration of our research. In this chapter, we briefly summarize what we have learned and offer some suggestions for future studies that will further advance the science of engagement and deliberation. We also encourage the interested reader to access our data and other supplemental files in order to conduct additional analyses of the data we collected.