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Summary (May 06, 2003): If humans are the most important species on our planet, then that belief affects whether one thinks that life exists beyond Earth. On the other hand, believing in many other potential third rocks from the Sun is akin to seeing an unprivileged position.
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Self-Centered Planets By Douglas Vakoch, SETI Institute
A search for signals from extraterrestrials will probably be successful if it lasts long enough. And humans are the most important species on Earth.
Do you agree or disagree with the above two statements?
Anthropocentrism and beliefs in life beyond Earth can be measured by getting responses to a few, well-chosen statements - like the two sentences that start this article. And once we can accurately measure people's attitudes - like how anthropocentric (human-centered) people are and how strongly they believe in the possibility of life beyond Earth - it's a short step to looking for relationships between these sorts of attitudes.
Drawing on the responses to our Internet survey, and analyzing these data with some basic statistics, we learn that there is in fact a significant correlation, or pattern, between these two attitudes. Specifically, the more anthropocentric a person is, the less likely they are to believe that life exists beyond Earth.
We can interpret this finding in a very straightforward manner. If people think that humankind possesses a privileged position on Earth, they are less likely to think that other beings exist on other planets. The impact of discovering life beyond Earth has often been characterized as another Copernican revolution. Copernicus's theory, you might recall, removed the Earth from its privileged place at the center of the solar system. Discovering life beyond Earth - particularly life capable of sending radio signals - might give humans a comparable sense of being "off center," as we get used to the knowledge that we are not the only intelligence in the universe.
Of the people who took the online survey, 40 percent fell on the anthropocentric side of the scale - having anywhere from a slight to a strong belief that humans occupy a privileged place in the greater scheme of things. The other 60 percent tended to see humans as only one species among others on Earth.
But even though our Internet survey showed a pattern in the way these two attitudes - anthropocentrism and belief in extraterrestrial life - are related to one another, that doesn't tell the whole story. Just as importantly, how accurately can we predict people's beliefs about life beyond Earth? Somewhat akin to the way that SETI astronomers look for artificial signals that stand out from the cosmic background noise, SETI social scientists can look for patterns in the answers people give to surveys. And even though in our Internet survey there were many sources of noise, nevertheless, we were able to find a clear pattern in the survey responses. As we noted above, we found a consistent pattern in the data: the more anthropocentric respondents were less likely to believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. But how strong was this pattern?
One way to get a handle on the strength of the pattern that we detected through our online survey is to see how our results compare with a more traditional method of gathering data through surveys. As it turns out, in spite of all of the challenges associated with Internet surveys, we did discover the same general pattern as we discovered in a more standard research setting: a survey of undergraduate students. In that earlier study, using pencil-and-paper questionnaires under closely monitored testing conditions, we found a considerably stronger relationship between how anthropocentric people are and their beliefs in life beyond Earth.
That study looked at responses of university students in Hong Kong and the United States. As compared to the Internet survey, we were able to do nearly three times better in accounting for the scores of the American students who took the pencil-and-paper survey, and nearly five times better for the Chinese students. But what do those numbers mean?
Without getting into the intricacies of statistics, they show that the pattern we found using the old-fashioned paper-and-pencil test was stronger than the pattern we found with our online survey. Though we found the same pattern in both cases (more anthropocentric people were less likely to believe in extraterrestrial life), we were better able to predict people's responses to the survey when we tested people under standard laboratory conditions, rather than in the comfort of their own homes.
In our next and final article in this series, we will take a step beyond the factors influencing people's beliefs that life might exist on other worlds, as we examine the hypothetical questions "Suppose we receive a message from extraterrestrials? What would the extraterrestrials be like?" As we shall see, our answers to those questions may tell us more about ourselves than about life beyond Earth.
Related Web Pages SETI Institute
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