Explaining the 'Yuck factor':

This paper explores the phenomenon of the 'Yuck factor', or that people who are not informed or aware about a new technology, are likely to reject it, this is important as it can harm technological development. The paper attempts to propose an alternative to existing explanations of 'Yuck' that often dismiss it as intuition. It does this, using multiple regression and (partial) correlations to establish the main relationships between variables. Even though its composition differs greatly from previous research, this dataset supports the existence of a 'Yuck factor' in the Netherlands. It is found that a highly educated public is more likely to be more aware, which leads them to value the positive sides of a new technology more than the negative. The negative association found between gender role traditionalism and awareness, is hypothesized to be because of the selection of media outlets, where news selection based on existing values reinforces these values. A similar (negative) relationship was found between awareness and anomia, where additional correlations revealed a picture of the anomic individual using media as an escape. Finally, controlling for gender role traditionalism did not cause the interaction effect of religiosity and awareness to become no longer significant. Anomia however did and could be used to explain why people, when they do not know about a new technology, regardless of cultural predispositions, do not accept it.