IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2018 - 81

In addition, given the conflicts that sometimes arise
around scientific findings and technologies (e.g., climate
change, vaccines, [3], [4]), we also gave explicit attention
to whether and how public support for UAVs varied by
self-reported political ideology, issue attitudes, and perceptions of end-user trustworthiness. Finally, because
UAVs for civilian purposes represented relatively new
technologies at the time of the first survey, we examined
whether public opinion is changing over time, as more
people become aware of UAVs. We thus administered the
same survey twice, separated by one year, in the fall of
2014 and 2015.
The results of our experimental manipulations revealed a surprising lack of impact of terminology and UAV
autonomy, a small impact of message framing and UAV
end-user, and a relatively large impact of UAV purpose.
We did not find that public attitudes changed much over
the year between samples, and perceptions of end-user
trustworthiness were strong predictors of public support.
Still, our regression models only accounted for about
40% of the variance in public support, suggesting that
additional variables should be studied in future work to
gain a more complete understanding of public support for
UAVs. We also found evidence of a small amount of political polarization of public opinion related to who was
using the UAVs for what purpose, and this polarization
appeared to be changing over time.
Taken together, our results - which may be especially useful to UAV designers, marketers, and policy makers - suggest there is a need to establish that the UAVs
are used for valued purposes and by users that publics
find to be trustworthy. However, public judgments might
be significantly impacted by personal or local ideologies
rather than national priorities. In the next section, we
describe in more detail prior research on public support
for UAVs, and how we formulated our research questions
and hypotheses. We then describe our methods, results,
and findings in greater detail.

Background and Research Questions
In this research, our primary interest was to advance
understanding of factors that impact public support -
potentially including politically polarized support - for
UAVs in the U.S. Some of our research questions were
derived from questions facing professionals designing
UAVs, such as, does it matter what the technologies are
called? Other questions were inspired by prior social science findings, for instance, how easy is it to evoke political polarization in response to UAVs?

Communicating about UAVs:
Terminology and Framing
Some UAV industry professionals, concerned about how
terminology might impact public perceptions, have tried
march 2018

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to persuade the U.S. media to stop calling the technology
"drones." Their concern is that the word "drone" evokes
negative visions - perhaps of large predatory war instruments unthinkingly and unapologetically completing
their missions without regard for collateral damage [5].
Social science theory and research also suggests that
the terminology used to describe objects can influence
people's perceptions. Euphemistic labeling refers to how
different terms (e.g., military force vs. war; collateral
damage vs. innocent victims) impact people's responses
to verbal descriptions of events and objects [6], [7]. In
general, language does matter, and different terms and
phrases often are associated with different emotions
and cognitive associations [8]. Although a prior study
found terminology had little or no effect on public attitudes toward drones [9], that study was conducted in
Australia and it is unclear whether the findings will generalize to the U.S. On the other hand, we might expect
terminology to have no effect in the U.S. because the
term "drones" has been commonly used by the media
and others when referring to commercial applications of
the technologies, thereby potentially reducing the association between the term "drone" and military activity.
Even if terminology does not affect public perceptions, other communicative factors may. A particularly
common finding in the social sciences is that humans
tend to be more strongly motivated to avoid losses or
prevent harm than to approach gains or promote benefits [10], [11]. For example, very different levels of support are offered when inquiring about "saving lives" (a
benefit) versus "preventing deaths" (a harm)-with people generally more supportive of efforts to prevent
deaths than to save lives [10]. If this framing effect
applies to the current context, framing of UAVs in terms
of harms they can prevent should result in more support
than framing them in terms of benefits they might promote. Some research, however, suggests that opinions
are less susceptible to framing effects when people
have thought more deeply and analytically about the
issues [12], [13]. Thus, if framing effects are not found,
or are found but appear to be decreasing over time, this
could indicate that the public is forming more robust
opinions that are less influenced by communication factors. In lieu of any prior evidence or significant event
occurring between surveys, we had no reason to expect
that the framing effects would not occur or would
change over time. Thus, our first research question (RQ)
and hypothesis (H) is as follows:
■■ RQ1: Is public support impacted by communicative
factors such as terminology describing the technology and/or promotion and prevention framing, and
do these impacts change over time?
■■ H1: Consistent with prior research, terminology will
have no impact on public support, but framing will

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