"... aber ich sage: 'das was ich esse, das bin ich', nicht?": Widerstand gegen gentechnisch veränderte Nahrungsmittel im Kontext von Identitätsfragen

'Anwendungen der Gentechnik in Landwirtschaft und Nahrungsmittelproduktion treffen in Österreich auf eine breite Front des öffentlichen Widerstands. In diesem Beitrag beschäftigen wir uns mit der Frage, inwiefern dieser Widerstand gegen die so genannte 'grüne' Gentechnik über Nutzen und Risikoabwägungen hinaus auch als Ausdruck regionaler und kultureller Identität verstanden werden kann. Basierend auf der Analyse von Diskussionen mit verschiedenen Gruppen der österreichischen Bevölkerung sowie von Dokumenten zu politischen und wirtschaftlichen Initiativen zeigt unser Beitrag, wie sich Bevölkerung und Initiativen auf eine gemeinsam geteilte Identitätskonstruktion beziehen: Österreich als qualitätsbewusstes Land, für dessen Selbstverständnis Tradition, Kleinteiligkeit und biologische Landwirtschaft von großer Bedeutung sind. Indem 'grüne' Gentechnik häufig mit Industrialisierung, Globalisierung und Amerikanisierung assoziiert wird, wird sie zur Bedrohung dieser lokalen Identität.' (Autorenreferat

Communicating Synthetic Biology: from the lab via the media to the broader public

We present insights from a study on communicating Synthetic Biology conducted in 2008. Scientists were invited to write press releases on their work; the resulting texts were passed on to four journalists from major Austrian newspapers and magazines. The journalists in turn wrote articles that were used as stimulus material for eight group discussions with select members of the Austrian public. The results show that, from the lab via the media to the general public, communication is characterized by two important tendencies: first, communication becomes increasingly focused on concrete applications of Synthetic Biology; and second, biotechnology represents an important benchmark against which Synthetic Biology is being evaluated

Bildung für die Qualität der Lehre - Ein hochschuldidaktischer Lehrgang an der JKU Linz

Im Jahre 2004 startet an der Johannes Kepler Universität (JKU) Linz ein neues hochschuldidaktisches Bildungsangebot für alle Lehrenden, an dem alle nach dem 1.1.2004 Angestellten laut Dienstvertrag teilnehmen müssen. Der in diesem Beitrag vorgestellte Lehrgang "Bildung für die Qualität der Lehre" wird vom Zentrum für soziale und interkulturelle Kompetenz der JKU angeboten. Das Konzept für den Lehrgang wurde in den letzten Monaten von einer interdisziplinären Arbeitsgruppe erstellt. Im Beitrag skizzieren wir zunächst die Rahmenbedingungen und die Ausgangspunkte des Konzeptes. Im Zentrum steht die Vorstellung des geplanten Lehrgangs, der im Juni 2004 begonnen hat. Im Ausblick versprechen wir unter anderem einen Bericht über die Evaluation des ersten Lehrgangs. 08.12.2004 | Martin Heinrich, Nicole Kronberger, Jürgen Maasz & Walter Ötsch (Linz

Bottom up ethics - neuroenhancement in education and employment

Neuroenhancement involves the use of neurotechnologies to improve cognitive, affective or behavioural functioning, where these are not judged to be clinically impaired. Questions about enhancement have become one of the key topics of neuroethics over the past decade. The current study draws on in-depth public engagement activities in ten European countries giving a bottom-up perspective on the ethics and desirability of enhancement. This informed the design of an online contrastive vignette experiment that was administered to representative samples of 1000 respondents in the ten countries and the United States. The experiment investigated how the gender of the protagonist, his or her level of performance, the efficacy of the enhancer and the mode of enhancement affected support for neuroenhancement in both educational and employment contexts. Of these, higher efficacy and lower performance were found to increase willingness to support enhancement. A series of commonly articulated claims about the individual and societal dimensions of neuroenhancement were derived from the public engagement activities. Underlying these claims, multivariate analysis identified two social values. The Societal/Protective highlights counter normative consequences and opposes the use enhancers. The Individual/Proactionary highlights opportunities and supports use. For most respondents these values are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that for many neuroenhancement is viewed simultaneously as a source of both promise and concern

Family first: Evidence of consistency and variation in the value of family versus personal happiness across 49 different cultures

People care about their own well-being, but also about the well-being of their families. It is currently however unknown how much people tend to value their own and their family’s well-being. A recent study documented that people value family happiness over personal happiness across four cultures. In this study, we sought to replicate this finding across a larger sample size (N = 12,819) and a greater number of countries (N = 49), We found that the strength of the idealization of family over personal happiness preference was small (average Cohen’s ds = .20 with country levels varying from -.02 to almost .48), but ubiquitous, i.e., direction presented in 98% of the studied countries, 73-75% with statistical significance and .40 and .30). Importantly, we did not find strong support for traditional theories in cross-cultural psychology that associate collectivism with greater prioritization of the family versus the individual; country level individualism-collectivism was not associated with variation in the idealization of family versus individual happiness. Our findings indicate that no matter how much various populists abuse the argument of “protecting family life” to disrupt emancipation, family happiness seems to be a pan-culturally phenomenon. Family well-being is a key ingredient of social fabric across the world, and should be acknowledged by psychology and well-being researchers, and by progressive movements too

Societal emotional environments and cross-cultural differences in life satisfaction: A forty-nine country study.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of ‘societal emotional environment’: the emotional climate of a society (operationalized as the degree to which positive and negative emotions are expressed in a society). Using data collected from 12,888 participants across 49 countries, we show how societal emotional environments vary across countries and cultural clusters, and we consider the potential importance of these differences for well-being. Multilevel analyses supported a ‘double-edged sword’ model of negative emotion expression, where expression of negative emotions predicted higher life satisfaction for the expresser but lower life satisfaction for society. In contrast, partial support was found for higher societal life satisfaction in positive societal emotional environments. Our study highlights the potential utility and importance of distinguishing between positive and negative emotion expression, and adopting both individual and societal perspectives in well-being research. Individual pathways to happiness may not necessarily promote the happiness of others

Personal life satisfaction as a measure of societal happiness is an individualistic presumption: Evidence from fifty countries

Numerous studies document that societal happiness is correlated with individualism, but the nature of this phenomenon remains understudied. In the current paper, we address this gap and test the reasoning that individualism correlates with societal happiness because the most common measure of societal happiness (i.e., country-level aggregates of personal life satisfaction) is individualism-themed. With the data collected from 13,009 participants across fifty countries, we compare associations of four types of happiness (out of which three are more collectivism-themed than personal life satisfaction) with two different measures of individualism. We replicated previous findings by demonstrating that societal happiness measured as country-level aggregate of personal life satisfaction is correlated with individualism. Importantly though, we also found that the country-level aggregates of the collectivism-themed measures of happiness do not tend to be significantly correlated with individualism. Implications for happiness studies and for policy makers are signaled

Introduction to a culturally sensitive measure of well-being: Combining life satisfaction and interdependent happiness across 49 different cultures

How can one conclude that well-being is higher in country A than country B, when wellbeing is being measured according to the way people in country A think about wellbeing? We address this issue by proposing a new culturally sensitive method to comparing societal levels of well-being. We support our reasoning with data on life satisfaction and interdependent happiness focusing on individual and family, collected mostly from students, across forty-nine countries. We demonstrate that the relative idealization of the two types of wellbeing varies across cultural contexts and are associated with culturally different models of selfhood. Furthermore, we show that rankings of societal well-being based on life satisfaction tend to underestimate the contribution from interdependent happiness. We introduce a new culturally sensitive method for calculating societal well-being, and examine its construct validity by testing for associations with the experience of emotions and with individualism-collectivism. This new culturally sensitive approach represents a slight, yet important improvement in measuring well-being