By James Wickett-Whyte, Associate Director Energy & Environment, Public Affairs, Ipsos
As dialogue practitioners, we see repeatedly that the success of conversations about complex technology often hinges on one key factor: how familiar those technologies feel to people. Ipsos’ recent Citizens’ Panels, delivered for Sciencewise and the Climate Change Committee on reaching Net Zero and adapting to a changing climate, demonstrated this – which we are calling the ‘Familiarity Principle’. The panels revealed that discussions around emerging technology presents a significant barrier to public acceptance, and the further it is from people’s everyday experience, the bigger this barrier becomes.
The Challenge: Navigating the Familiarity Spectrum
Our dialogues show that public engagement is more intuitive when it focuses on adapting existing, familiar systems. For example, in the 2026 adaptation panel, there was strong support for improving home insulation – a well-understood technology that offers the dual benefit of keeping homes warm in winter and cool in summer. The conversation could quickly move to priorities because the concept was already familiar.
In contrast, entirely new technologies can face a “trust deficit”. In the 2024 mitigation panel, heat pumps were a clear example of this. As a technology few participants had encountered, they had practical worries about noise, space, and the disruption of installation. This unfamiliarity was captured by one participant who reflected that “I can phone someone to fix my boiler. I don’t know that with a heat pump”.
However, this isn’t to say that familiarity guarantees acceptance. Even well-understood technologies face barriers. While electric cars operate in a familiar way to petrol and diesel cars, participants in the 2024 mitigation panel expressed initial reservations about the costs of purchasing one and the wider infrastructure needed.
New technology and a “trust deficit” should not be a barrier to deliberation, but a signpost for it. It tells us precisely where our role as practitioners begins: in consciously designing a process to build understanding so that trust might be developed.
Bridging the Gap: The Role of Experience and Evidence
The most productive discussions happen when a topic connects directly to people’s lived experience. The adaptation panel showed that participants’ understanding of flood risk was high because many had seen or experienced its devastating impact firsthand. This personal connection makes an abstract risk feel real and the need for action urgent.
The challenge for any dialogue arises when that direct experience is missing – which is not unusual in the context of complex policy issues that deliberation is best suited to navigating. This is where participants must be presented with arguments and evidence around the introduction of a proposed solution, but also the risks and considerations to ensure that the process is balanced. Across both panels, we saw that when personal experience is absent, people want to see proof. For unfamiliar technologies like heat pumps, this meant a demand for “positive testimonials” and “case studies where heat pumps are working”. This desire for proven success was just as strong in the adaptation panel, where participants looked to other countries for “exemplars of best practice” in managing extreme weather. In essence, if they can’t draw on their own lived experience, they need to be able to draw on alternative forms of evidence.
But what happens when a technology is so new that no case studies exist? Here, our deliberative toolkit must be even more creative. We can use techniques like participatory futures (as we used in the Future of Flight Challenge dialogue), imagined real world items (which we created with The Liminal Space in the Genome Edited Foods dialogue) and scenario-based exercises (a key part of both our dialogues with the CCC and the Net Zero Pathways dialogue) to help participants navigate the unknown, allowing them to establish a framework for their values even in the absence of real-world examples.
The Power of Framing: The Exception of Nature
Finally, the dialogues offered a lesson in framing. Nature-based solutions, such as “sponge cities,” were new concepts to many but were met with enthusiasm. This is because the dialogue framed them as working within a familiar and trusted system – nature – rather than imposing something artificial. Nature, in this context, is trusted because people have an intuitive, almost archetypal understanding of its processes like growth and water, even if the specific ‘sponge city’ application is new.
What it means for deliberation
For dialogue practitioners, the lesson is clear. Our task is not to avoid complex topics, but to build a bridge from the known to the unknown. This can be done by:
- Grounding proposals in lived experience or actively substituting for it with trusted evidence; or
- Framing new concepts as parallels to existing systems that are seen as sensible or are widely supported.
This way we don’t just present information – we build the confidence needed for a truly productive public conversation.
