Bottom up Ethics - Neuroenhancement in Education and Employment

This is the accompanying dataset for the publication Bottom-up Ethics - Neuroenhancement in Education and Employment (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-018-9366-7). The data was collected during the European Commision-funded NERRI project, which sought to facilitate Europe-wide discussion about the ethical acceptability and social desirability of neuroenhancement. We conducted an online survey with over 1000 respondents from 10 European countries and the United States. The survey included two contrastive vignette experiments and 14 attitude questions, which were derived from a series of public engagement activities. The SPSS dataset contains 50 variables, capturing sociodemographic indicators, the experimental manipulations, the 14 attitude statements, and two scales constructed using PCA. Paper abstract: 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 of 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.