…Acceptability & Willingness: In January 2022, we conducted a preregistered, nationally representative US survey-based experiment on the attitudes of 6,823 people towards 3 services: PGT-P [embryo selection using PGSes], gene editing [CRISPR], and—as a nongenetic benchmark for attitudes toward interventions targeted at college admissions—courses to prepare for the SAT test (effective n after applying weights, 3,805; see Table S1 for sample characteristics). We randomized participants to answer two questions, in randomized order, about one of these 3 services.
One question asked whether the respondent views the service as morally acceptable, morally wrong, or not a moral issue; participants could also indicate whether they were unsure. For this question, both PGT-P and gene editing were described as being potentially used for “medical and nonmedical traits.”
The other question measured willingness to use each service by asking participants how likely it was—on a scale 0–100%—that they would use the service to increase the odds that their offspring will attend a top-100 college by selecting for genetic variants, or enrolling their child in courses, associated with higher educational attainment.
We asked participants to assume that each service was free. We also asked them to assume a realistic effect size: We told them that about 3% of high school seniors attend a top-100 ranked college, and that each service would raise their likelihood of having such a child by two percentage points (3–5%). In the cases of gene editing and PGT-P, we asked them to assume that they were already using IVF and that the add-on service was safe. Finally, we further randomized participants within each “service condition” to be told that it was used on average by either “1 out of every 10” or “9 out of every 10” similarly situated people (for the PGT-P and gene editing arms, “people currently having babies”; for the SAT prep arm, “people who currently have high-school-age children”).
Social Norm, Age, and Education: A minority of participants (41%) said they had no moral objection to gene editing for “certain medical and nonmedical traits” (ie. they reported it was morally acceptable or not a moral issue), and a majority of participants reported no moral objection to PGT-P (58%) or SAT prep (76%) (Figure S1 and Table S2). On average, participants said they were 34% likely to use gene editing, 43% likely to use PGT-P, and 69% likely to use SAT prep to increase the odds of their child attending a top-100 college (see the Figure S2 && Table S2). Furthermore, a material fraction of participants reported a >50% likelihood of using each service (28% gene editing, 38% PGT-P, 68% SAT prep; Table S2).
As predicted, those who were told that 90% of relevant people use each service were more likely to say that they, too, would use it, compared to those who were told that 10% of people were using it. The mean willingness to use gene editing, PGT-P, and SAT prep was 4 (p = 0.020), 5 (p = 0.007), and 4 (p = 0.022) percentage points higher, respectively, for those in the 90% condition (Table S3). These effect sizes are typical of those reported for behavioral intentions from other social norm manipulations.
…In the US, there appears to be both greater moral acceptance of, and greater willingness under certain circumstances to use, PGT-P versus gene editing—and the more people use PGT-P, the more likely others say they would, too.
