Public attitudes towards nanotechnology- enabled cognitive enhancement in the United States

Anticipatory governance of emergent technologies depends on a comprehensive understanding of the values in society that shape public understanding of new and emerging technologies, as well as their response to related technologies already available within the culture (Barben et al. 2008; Guston and Sarewitz 2002). One method of contributing to the understanding of public values is to measure them directly through survey research. In this chapter, we present results from a 2008 national survey about nanotechnology and human enhancements. More specifically, the survey was designed to evaluate the public’s support for potential nano-enabled cognitive enhancement technologies. To the best of our knowledge, it was the first nationally representative survey about human enhancements to be conducted in the United States. Where appropriate, we also report some preliminary findings from a follow-up survey in 2010 that supplement our analysis of the 2008 study, but we intend to report the bulk of the 2010 survey elsewhere.