Resumen de Social representations and attitudes towards cloning: proposal of an empirical study

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• This paper aims to analyze the social representations and the attitudes towards cloning. The entry in the age of cloning has raised anxiety and alarm. Elapsed some time and at a more peaceful period, we consider useful to analyze a fact that was perceived as a disturbing phenomenon in the 90s. We propose to understand the social representations of cloning in the general public and in two groups that have a more intimate relationship with the subject in question: The public health professionals and the official agents of the Catholic Church. In the evaluation of the social representations objectivation, the empirical study adopts the technique of free and continued association of words, hypothesizing the emergence of the therapeutic, ethical, and religious dimensions. For the anchoring process we built a Likert scale and a semantic differentiator in terms of evaluative, power and activity dimensions.

  We predict that the major difference between the group representations of cloning is located in the opposition between a therapeutic perspective (assumed by health professionals) and a dehumanizing perspective (faced by leaders of the Catholic Church) of cloning.