In a cross-cultural study that psychologist Yuh-shiow Lee and I conducted several years ago, we looked at the attitudes of college students towards the possibility that extraterrestrial life might exist. And if it does, what it might be like for people to learn that it exists. We surveyed students at universities in Hong Kong and the United States with the same questions that were included in our online survey. (In fact, we asked many more questions in the original survey, but to avoid taxing the patience of volunteer Internet respondents, the online survey used only a subset of the items from the original study.)

In that study of Chinese and American views, Lee and I created several new sets of questionnaire items that would let us examine beliefs about extraterrestrial life. In this article, Ill describe one of those "scales," or sets of items that we described in more detail in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica.

Before we make contact with life beyond Earth, one of the most basic questions we can ask about ET life is "does it exist?" In our online survey, we included seven items to tap into this broader question. For each statement, the respondents indicated the degree to which they agreed or disagreed.

• There are so many stars in the universe that there must be life around some of them.
• Because the laws of nature are the same throughout the known universe, extraterrestrial intelligence probably exists.
• A search for signals from extraterrestrials will probably be successful if it lasts long enough.
• Any of our spacecraft that leave our solar system should carry messages on them, just in case they are found later by extraterrestrials.
• There are no forms of life in other star systems that are as advanced as humans.
• I just cannot seriously believe that we will ever make contact with extraterrestrials.
• It is a waste of education to have scientists spend their time looking for extraterrestrials.

The reason that these seven items are grouped into the same scale is simple: the answers that people give to one statement tend to be closely related to their answers to the other statements. That doesnt mean that they will either agree or disagree to all the items. In fact, as a general rule, the responses to the last three items tend to be the opposite of the responses to the first four.

Its also possible that any particular person will break this pattern. For example, someone might be highly skeptical about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but still think its very important to educate SETI scientists -- just in case ET does exist. But collectively, looking at the people who completed the survey in our original study, there is a strong pattern among the responses to the seven statements listed above.

In our original study, Lee and I wanted to identify factors that influence peoples beliefs about extraterrestrial life. We hypothesized that one important variable would be how anthropocentric people are: that is, how much they view humankind as holding a privileged place in the world. Rather than starting from scratch to develop a scale of anthropocentrism, we searched the scientific literature and discovered that two other researchers had already done it.

In 1993, Edward W. Chandler and Ralph Mason Dreger published a pair of articles about anthropocentrism in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality. Dreger and Chandler had discovered many interrelated facets of anthropocentrism, and had developed scales for measuring peoples attitudes about them. For our study of attitudes about extraterrestrials, we focused on one particular factor that they discovered, which was represented in our online study by the following statements:

• The human species is without a doubt the most advanced form of life on Earth.
• Humans are the most important species on Earth.
• Humans are superior to all other animals in all important respects.
• Humans should control the environment for their own benefit as much as possible.
• Degree of intelligence ought to be the main measure for determining the superiority of one species over another.
• No matter how we define "superiority," it seems that humans must be considered superior to all known forms of life.
• Humans are the most significant entities in the universe.

The goal of the current survey, as noted above, is to examine some of the ways that social scientists contribute to SETI. Rather than simply tell readers the latest findings of psychologists and sociologists interested in extraterrestrial life, we want to take you through the process of research, step by step.

Now that you have learned about two of the scales we used to assess attitudes in our online survey, what do you predict about the relationship between the two scales? That is, if you know that someone thinks that life beyond Earth is very likely, can you say anything about how anthropocentric they are? What if a person thinks that Earth alone supports life? If you do hypothesize a close connection between these two scales, do you expect any exceptions to your rule -- or is it an ironclad law, with no exceptions?