intro pt3

With the rise of scientific issues such as genetic engineering in public debates, “science is becoming more politicized and controversial with widespread societal implications” (Rose, Korzekwa, Brossard, Scheufele & Heisler, 2017). As such, the importance of public attitudes towards these issues is increasing, as is engaging the public with these topics in order to increase knowledge and awareness (Rose, Korzekwa, Brossard, Scheufele & Heisler, 2017). People’s attitudes are influenced by their knowledge, and so people with different backgrounds will often have varying attitudes towards complex topics depending on how familiar they are with them. The University of Massachusetts Amherst has over 100 different undergraduate majors [CITATION], and presumably people in different majors will have had different levels of exposure to the topic of genome editing. In this study we investigated whether or not there is any observable connection between college major and people’s attitudes towards the use of genome editing to treat genetic disorders.