The Clouded Judgment over GMOs

There is a trend in America to go “natural” and “organic”, even though these terms aren’t always what people think they are. People are quick to jump to the assumption that natural and organic mean healthy. They are also quick to jump to the assumption that GMOs are unnatural, and therefore not healthy. There is a lot of press against GMOs for many different reasons. I think the controversy over GMOs is understandable and expected, and a lot of the issues surrounding GMOs are actually serious and need to be discussed. But what I’m focusing on in this post is how people perceive GMOs and the culture of jumping on the bandwagon. People are scared of change, and GMOs are a new technology that a lot of people don’t understand, resulting in many people being anti-GMO. I think a lot people have legitimate reasons to be anti-GMO, but I also think they’re a lot of people who just go with the trend and decide they’re anti-GMO because it seems like the right direction to lean.

            A lot of people believe that things labeled natural and organic are healthier for you, but ironically, Kashi, an American company, markets their products as natural when they contain GMOs. For a long time psychologists have observed a continuum in what we perceive as natural or unnatural. Natural are things that we find more familiar while what we consider unnatural tends to be perceptually and experientially more unfamiliar and complex. A more cognitive effort is needed to understand less familiar and more complex ideas, like GMOs. As I said before, natural is seen as good, while unnatural is not. GMOs involve human manipulation so are seen as highly unnatural, even though the history of agriculture is humans breeding seeds and animals to produce desirable traits.

            Unlike GMOs, organic foods are put in a very positive light. Researchers at Cornell University found that how food is labelled affects our perception of its nutritional value, taste and how much we’re willing to pay for it. They conducted an experiment where 150 shoppers were given three different food pairs, and in each one was labelled organic and the other regular. Though the two items were identical, when the shoppers were asked to rate the taste and nutritional value as well as how much they’d be willing to pay for the products, the researchers found that the shopper’s calorie estimates for the organically labelled foods were consistently lower and the shoppers also thought they tasted less artificial and more nutritious than the regular labelled foods, and in turn were willing to pay a lot more for them. Though the two foods they tried were exactly the same, because they attributed these things with organic food, they really believed that the so-called “organic” food was inherently better.

            While the perception of organic food is overall very good, GMOs suffer from the opposite, because they’re associated with being unnatural they’re seen as unhealthy and unsafe. People don’t trust unnatural foods and because GMOs are seen as unnatural, people are often times against them just off the simple basis that they are unnatural. Just as people’s beliefs about organic food skewed their perception of the foods they tasted, people’s perception about GMOs are skewed and impacts how they evaluate GMOs overall. They’re far more likely to only pay attention to the risks and not weigh the risks and benefits equally because they already distrust and have preconceived notions about GMOs. Psychologist Paul Slovic who has been studying perceptions of risk since the 1950s pointed out as early as 1979 that when it comes to new, unknown technologies, data always loses out to emotion.

            On top of the effects of distrusting and having certain associations with a new technology, once that initial opinion has been formed, it’s very hard to change even with new evidence. A piece of evidence can be interpreted in opposing ways depending on your starting viewpoint and if you are against something, you tend to focus a lot more on the negatives. I think Slovic sums up what I’m trying to argue very well. He states that three things stand in the way of a logical, analytical risk assessment of new technologies: our level of dread, our degree of familiarity or lack of, and the number of people we believe the technology will affect. GMOs are highly dreaded and have a large impact, while many people don’t even understand what genetic engineering of foods actually entails. I think that there needs to be more openness on both sides of the debate, the companies that make GMOs need to provide more information to the public and the people that are against GMOs need to weigh the risks and benefits equally.

Works Cited

"GMOs Spotlight | Learn Science at Scitable." Nature Publishing Group : science journals, jobs, and information. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Sept. 2013. <http://www.nature.com/scitable/spotlight/gmos-6978241>.

Hennessey, Rachel. "GMO Food Debate In The National Spotlight - Forbes."Information for the World's Business Leaders - Forbes.com. Forbes, 3 Nov. 2012. Web. 10 Oct. 2013. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelhennessey/2012/11/03/gmo-food-debate-in-the-national-spotlight/2/>.

KONNIKOVA, MARIA . "The Psychology of Distrusting G.M.O.s : The New Yorker."The New Yorker. N.p., 8 Aug. 2013. Web. 10 Oct. 2013. <http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/08/the-psychology-of-distrusting-gmos.html>.