By Hamish Johnston
No, at least according to a paper published yesterday in Nature Nanotechnology by researchers in the US and Singapore.
The team discovered that people who live in countries with a relatively high level of “religiosity” are less likely to agree that “nanotechnology is morally acceptable”.
Their study on public attitudes towards nanotechnology involved surveys of over 30,000 people in the US and 12 European countries. Americans topped the religiosity scale with a score of about 9 out of a possible 10, and also had the highest percentage of respondents (25%) who did not agree that nanotechnology is morally acceptable.
At the other end of the scale were countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden (5 and 4 on religiosity respectively) where far fewer respondents had negative moral issues with nanotechnology.
On the surface, this study seems to go against the popular notion of Europeans as Luddites, and Americans being keen to embrace new technologies.
The study is also interesting in relation to another paper published in the same issue of the journal but by a different team. This concludes that, “people who had more individualistic, pro-commerce values tended to infer that nanotechnology is safe”.
In terms of national stereotypes, that sounds more like your average American than your average Swede. Indeed, the UK and Ireland — which are usually thought of as individualistic and pro-commerce — also tended to be less morally accepting of nanotechnology than many of their more “socialist” neighbours.