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Estimated model with standardized regression weights for shale gas (SG), N = 948. *p < 0.01; **p < 0.001; n.s. = not significant.
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Risky energy technologies are often controversial and debates around them are polarized; in such debates public acceptability is key. Research on public acceptability has emphasized the importance of intrapersonal factors but has largely neglected the influence of interpersonal factors. In an online survey (N = 948) with a representative sample of...
Citations
... In particular, it remains an open question to what extent attitudes on such topics will affect political behaviors now and in the future. Risk and benefit perceptions have been found to contribute to attitudes and behaviors relating to the acceptance and governance of emerging technologies and risks (Bearth and Siegrist 2016;Bickerstaff et al. 2006;De Groot et al. 2020;Pidgeon et al. 2005;Poortinga and Pidgeon 2006). The items in the present study remained neutral on what the risks and harms of AI systems may be when asking about how AI developers and governments should govern AI systems. ...
We surveyed 582 AI researchers who have published in leading AI venues and 838 nationally representative US participants about their views on the potential development of AI systems with subjective experience and how such systems should be treated and governed. When asked to estimate the chances that such systems will exist on specific dates, the median responses were 1% (AI researchers) and 5% (public) by 2024, 25% and 30% by 2034, and 70% and 60% by 2100, respectively. The median member of the public thought there was a higher chance that AI systems with subjective experience would never exist (25%) than the median AI researcher did (10%). Both groups perceived a need for multidisciplinary expertise to assess AI subjective experience. Although support for welfare protections for such AI systems exceeded opposition, it remained far lower than support for protections for animals or the environment. Attitudes toward moral and governance issues were divided in both groups, especially regarding whether such systems should be created and what rights or protections they should receive. Yet a majority of respondents in both groups agreed that safeguards against the potential risks from AI systems with subjective experience should be implemented by AI developers now, and if created, AI systems with subjective experience should treat others well, behave ethically, and be held accountable. Overall, these results suggest that both AI researchers and the public regard the emergence of AI systems with subjective experience as a possibility this century, though substantial uncertainty and disagreement remain about the timeline and appropriate response.
... Factors such as uranium mining, nuclear waste management and disposal, and accidents, contribute to these impacts [7]. Accordingly, assessments of nuclear energy often address its political, economic, social, and emotional implications [8,9]. For example, Spain currently operates seven nuclear reactors dating from the 1980s, as well as a nuclear fuel plant and a radioactive waste storage facility. ...
One of the main challenges facing modern societies is achieving environmental sustainability. In the face of the current energy crisis, some countries regard nuclear energy as a viable solution to meet their population’s energy demands. This article analyzes the local people’s responses to a project to develop and exploit a uranium mine in Retortillo-Santidad, a rural area in northwestern Spain on the border with Portugal. Content analysis, using Atlas.ti software (version 23.0), of the open-ended responses of 55 citizens affected by the uranium mine, revealed through network analysis that the responses can be grouped into interconnected blocks. Concerns about risks to health and the traditional economy of the area are associated with a rejection of both the uranium mine and the project itself. In addition, community attitudes towards environmental sustainability, mistrust, and social conflicts among the affected population explain the opposition to the construction of the mine. Assessments reveal different reasons for this: some individuals place more value on the project benefits and their distrust of the company, while others focus more on perceived risks, community conflicts, and environmental sustainability. These findings have practical implications for the development of future energy policies. They emphasize the importance of ensuring that affected citizens are informed about reciprocal benefits, actively heard to understand their diverse evaluations of the mining project, and meaningfully included in the implementation of energy initiatives. This underscores the necessity of adopting a more inclusive approach.
... Besides, social impact, including the advice of the social cycle and peers, has been proven to significantly influence behavioral intention and widespread adoption of LLMs [33,34]. The results showed that compared with other factors, social impact is the most influential factor in the medical students' intentions, which is consistent with previous studies, as people's beliefs about innovative technologies have been established as the vital factor shaping people's intentions toward new technologies [38,75,76]. ...
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medical education, there is limited understanding of medical students’ acceptance of LLMs and the factors influencing their use. This study explores medical students’ acceptance of LLMs in learning and examines the factors influencing this acceptance through the lens of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). A questionnaire survey conducted among Chinese medical students revealed a high willingness to use LLMs in their studies. The findings suggest that attitudes play a crucial role in predicting medical students’ behavioral intentions to use LLMs, mediating the effects of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived risk. Additionally, perceived risk and social influence directly impact behavioral intentions. This study provides compelling evidence supporting the applicability of the TAM to the acceptance of LLMs in medical education, highlighting the necessity for medical students to utilize LLMs as an auxiliary tool in their learning process.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-024-06232-1.
... Another important difference is that the costs, risks, and benefits in the societal adoption perspective cover sociotropic evaluations. To take the example of nuclear energy, possible questions posed to respondents are about whether nuclear power degrades the environment, whether it is risky for society as a whole, or whether it has a positive impact on climate mitigation (De Groot et al. 2020). ...
Evidence on AI acceptance comes from a diverse field comprising public opinion research and largely experimental studies from various disciplines. Differing theoretical approaches in this research, however, imply heterogeneous ways of studying AI acceptance. The present paper provides a framework for systematizing different uses. It identifies three families of theoretical perspectives informing research on AI acceptance—user acceptance, delegation acceptance, and societal adoption acceptance. These models differ in scope, each has elements specific to them, and the connotation of technology acceptance thus changes when shifting perspective. The discussion points to a need for combining the three perspectives as they have all become relevant for AI. A combined approach serves to systematically relate findings from different studies. And as AI systems affect people in different constellations and no single perspective can accommodate them all, building blocks from several perspectives are needed to comprehensively study how AI is perceived in society.
... Public perception has been considered in different fields in the energy context, for instance in the public acceptance related to energy technologies, energy sources or energy policy. Indeed, according to the literature [11,21,33], public perception has an important role because a higher level of benefits perception increases public acceptance, and in addition, energy acceptance is strongly affected by individual perception; this affects public support for expanding sources. Moreover, Stoutenboroughetal et al. (2017) in their work found that people who think that the risks associated with nuclear waste storage are high have low support for nuclear energy. ...
The aim of this work is to investigate the energy misperception of different sources among the “Next Generation” group. The analysis is carried out in Italy and the data were obtained through an internet-based survey, administered via Instagram to capture the Next Generation’s perception of the national energy mix. We found that younger have more misperceptions and one of the possible explanations could be that they are more negatively affected by media and social media, or public opinion in general. Another motivation could be that the younger generation considers sustainability important and therefore tends to over-perceive renewable energy sources.
... Although it apparently does not contribute to the generation of greenhouse gases, it is economically more expensive than wind or solar power and is potentially more dangerous (McWilliams et al., 2022). In this sense, the evaluation of the potential risks and benefits of nuclear energy often focuses the debate on the political and economic level, as well as on the social and emotional one (de Groot et al., 2020;Peters and Slovic, 1996). ...
Abstract
The energy crisis caused by the lack of supply from some countries involved in armed conflicts, coupled with society's continuous demand for energy production, is leading to the proposal of new energy sources, such as the development of uranium mines to increase nuclear energy production. Mine projects (MPs) trigger numerous conflicts in the local societies involved. While for some people, they represent an opportunity for development and benefits, for others these proposals are perceived as a threat and a health risk. However, energy scarcity and price increases create a social dilemma that moderates the established relationships between the perceived risks and benefits and the valuation of energy proposals. This research aims to analyze both the weight of the factors influencing the acceptance of a uranium MP and the moderating role of the energy crisis on these factors. A total of 629 people participated in this study (371 before and 258 after the energy crisis). The participants answered a questionnaire assessing their socio-demographic characteristics, beliefs about the environment, the perceived risks and benefits, and their emotional balance, as well as their level of knowledge and acceptance of the uranium mine proposal. The results show that age, gender, and level of education and knowledge both directly and indirectly influence the acceptance of a mine. In addition, the perception of risks and benefits is associated with the emotional balance generated, explaining the level of final acceptance of the proposal. The moderation-mediated energy crisis hypothesis influences the relationship between the perceived risks and acceptance of the uranium mine. The results are discussed in order to determine factors for intervention to alleviate the social conflicts created by new energy proposals.
... This logic is aligned with the utility maximization theory from the economic science (U(x) = Benefit -Cost) (Rust et al., 2002) and the social exchange theory of social psychology (Homans, 1961). Following this mechanism, the relationship between risk and benefits verified have negative correlations (Awad & Krishnan, 2006;de Groot et al., 2020). Regarding the relationship between two privacy calculus factors, Nasser and Nasser (2020) examined that privacy risk concerns have negative impact toward benefit to disclose personal information when they use E-government platforms. ...
South Korea endured early outbreaks and flattened the coronavirus curve without paralyzing economic systems. The critical factor that leads to the policy’s success is contact tracing using personal information. However, at the same time, the extensive use of personal information has raised social problems related to privacy loss. Even in devastating pandemics, balancing personal privacy and public safety remains a crucial issue. Thus, this study attempted to gain a deeper understanding of privacy disclosure for restaurant customers. We applied privacy calculus theory and risk-risk trade-off concepts to explain the relationship between two conflicting risks. i.e., privacy risk and health risk. We found that “risk substitutions” provide implications for how customers’ privacy perceptions change with the level of health risk and the importance of perceived benefit. Finally, we verified that institutional privacy protection directly influences disclosure intention. This study has implications for theory and practice.
... Overall, perceived opportunities of robots and the rejection of potential risks in this study lead to a high level of conditional acceptance and endorsement. This also confirms the assumption of de Groot et al. (2020) that attitude acceptance only occurs when more opportunities than risks are perceived. Surprisingly, the dimension of indifference also finds agreement even among proponents and critical supporters of robots, suggesting the presence of uncertainty within these groups. ...
Societal attitude acceptance can influence the digital transformation in agriculture. Digital technologies, such as robots in dairy farming, can lead to more sustainable, animal welfare-friendly and consumer-oriented milk production. This study used the example of the milking and feeding robots to investigate whether society accepts the use of robots in dairy farming and whether there are differences in society based on perceived risks and opportunities of digitalization in dairy farming and acceptance. To this end, an online-based study was conducted with a total of 1007 citizens in Germany. Overall, the respondents in this study suspect that the use of robots in dairy farming is associated with various risks but also with opportunities for society and for farmers in particular. However, these attitudes are quite heterogeneous. Four clusters could be identified: “proponents of robots”, “indifferent citizens”, “skeptical citizens”, and “critical supporters of robots”. Proponents of robots see only opportunities and little risks, whereas the critical citizens perceive not only opportunities but also many risks of using robots in dairy farming. The indifferent citizens show a rather indifferent attitude, in contrast to the skeptical citizens, who reject the opportunities at the societal level, while they agree with the opportunities of robots for farmers. This research contributes to understanding societal attitudinal acceptance and highlights differences in society that can help inform future decisions about the development and adoption of robots in dairy farming.
... Beliefs are directly associated with risk perception (or gain perception), which is an essential process for the acceptance of a particular technological project. Thus, perceived benefits and risks have a powerful effect on emotional reactions and the level of acceptance (de Groot et al., 2020). In this sense, in the present research, we find it interesting to analyze the relationship between environmental beliefs, risk and benefit perception associated with the development of the uranium mine, both with the emotional state it generates in citizens and with the possible acceptance of the mining project. ...
Introduction
The demographic growth and the development of the welfare system have been accompanied by an important social dilemma between preserving nature or promoting energy development by assuming the benefits and risks of both proposals. This research attempts to address this social dilemma by analyzing the psychosocial factors that influence the acceptance or rejection of a new uranium mining development and exploitation project. The main objective was to test an explanatory theoretical model of uranium mining project acceptance, based on the interrelation of sociodemographic variables (e.g., age, gender, economic and educational situation, and level of knowledge about uranium energy) and cognitive variables (e.g., environmental beliefs, risk, and benefit perceptions), along with the activation of an emotional balance in response to the proposal of constructing a uranium mine.
Method
Three hundred seventy-one individuals responded to the questionnaire about the variables included in the model.
Results
The results showed that older participants showed lower levels of agreement with the mining proposal people, while women and those with greater knowledge of nuclear energy perceived greater risks and had a more negative emotional balance. The proposed explanatory model based on sociodemographic, cognitive, and affective variables showed good fit indices for explaining the assessment of the uranium mine. Thus, age, level of knowledge, risks and benefits, and emotional balance had a direct effect on the acceptance of the mine. Likewise, emotional balance showed a partial mediation effect between the relationships existing between the perception of benefits and risks and the acceptance of the mining proposal.
Discussion
The results are discussed based on the consideration of analyzing sociodemographic, cognitive, and affective variables to understand potential conflicts in communities affected by energy projects.
... As demand increases and easier to extract fossil fuel sources become depleted, there is impetus by governments and industry partners to identify and develop previously inaccessible oil and gas reserves through application of increasingly more extreme technologies, with unknown and potentially more severe risks than conventional hydrocarbons operations (Short et al. 2015). The USA has had arguable success in use of hydraulic fracturing for shale-embedded natural gas to open up new resources in the name of national energy security and as a lower carbon fuel solution (de Groot et al. 2020;Williams and Sovacool 2019). There is, however, a wealth of evidence that these new technologies pose risks to the environment, human and animal health, climate change, as well as significant social and community impacts (Howarth 2019; Short and Szolucha 2019). ...
