After Attitudes: Tracking the Distance Between Science and Society to Guide Action (A Joint GSEJ–PET Vision Paper)

Advances in the life sciences are reshaping not only what societies can do, but what we expect and owe to ourselves, one another and future generations. Yet knowing what people think about emerging technologies does not necessarily tell us what to do. Public views are often the visible expression of deeper relationships with science, shaped by trust, relevance, resources, agency and institutional structures.

This vision paper argues for moving after attitudes: not abandoning research on public attitudes, but asking what comes after what we have learned, how we should respond to evolving and conflicting views, and what, in listening to the public, we should be after. We propose shifting attention from attitudes themselves to the social distance between people, institutions and emerging scientific possibilities.

Through the 12-month Wellcome-funded Tuning EARS for the Future pilot, GSEJ and PET will develop and test EARS, a compass for action mapping social distance across four dimensions: Epistemic, Affective, Resource and Structural. Using direct-to-consumer genomics and in vitro gametogenesis as contrasting cases, the project aims to develop a transferable approach for turning public voices into more nuanced, reflexive and action-oriented knowledge for the public good.