Cognitive illiberalism: anatomy of a bias

That's the title of a talk I gave today at Arizona State Law School & yesterday at the University of Arizona Law School.

The talk, which I gave to faculty-workshop audiences who had read They Saw a Protest, first offers an analytically precise account of how cultural cognition can defeat Bayesian updating. It then identifies how this form of cognitive decisionmaking bias generates "cognitive illiberalism," a legal and political decisionmaking bias that poses the same threat to constitutional freedoms as consciously illiberal forms of state action.

Probably will write this up as short paper. For now--slides here.  

Update on Sunday, November 11, 2012 at 4:59PM by Dan Kahan

Now have written a paper that develops this position.