European citizens and attitudes towards science and technology: what account for societal development and scientific knowledge?

In times of global challenges and transformations, such as emerging technologies, many researchers have strived to improve the laypeople-experts relationship to address them. Much research has been done on the attitudes that people have towards science and technology. However, the results are often contrasting: scientific knowledge can either have a positive or no role in more positive attitudes. In addition, more recent studies have begun to wonder whether institutional factors and social structures can influence such attitudes. By employing the post-materialist transformation in value, some researchers have found a negative association between country development and support for science and technology. Scientific knowledge in highly developed countries makes the relationship with attitudes towards science and technologies unpredictable. Although promising, this topic has not yet been adequately explored. This paper intends to shed light on this by analysing how and to what extent scientific knowledge and societal development influence attitudes towards science and technology. Using data from Eurobarometer 95.2, the paper follows two steps. First, it builds synthetic indices to analyse attitudes toward science and technology, societal development and scientific knowledge. In order to do so, it uses synthetic methodologies that respect the nature of the selected elementary indicators, in particular, the Counting Approach and the Partially Ordered Set (poset) Theory. Then, it identifies a model to analyse, according to the literature, the effects of different factors on attitudes towards science and technology. To do this, a finite mixture model of linear regressions is used in the paper, with the idea that the effect of independent variables can be different for different levels of the dependent variable. The results indicate that these factors significantly influence attitudes towards science and technology, with nuanced differences that merit further investigation.