MAPKIA! Episode 31 "Answer": culturally programmed risk predispositions alert to "fracking" but say "enh" (pretty much) to GM foods - Cultural Cognition of Health

Okay!  “Tomorrow” has arrived, which means it’s time to real the “answer” “yesterday’s” “MAPKIA! ” episode.

As you no doubt recall, the question was …

(i) What is the relationship between environmental-risk predispositions, as measured by ENVRISK_SCALE, and perceptions of GM food risks and fracking, respectively? And (ii), how, if at all, does science comprehension, as measured by SCICOMP, affect the relationship between people’s environmental-risk predispositions and their perceptions of the dangers posed by GM food and fracking, respectively?

What made this an interesting question, I thought, was that both “fracking” and GM foods are novel risk sources.

I was going to say if you read this blog this might surprise you, because in that case you have a weridly off-the-scale degree of interest in political debates over environmental risks and thus are grossly over-exposed to people discussing and arguing about fracking and GM food risks and what “the public” thinks about the same.

But if you do regularly read this blog, then you, unlike most of the other weird people who fit that description, actually know that most Americans haven’t heard of fracking and aren’t too sure what GM foods are either.

Indeed, if you regularly read this blog (why do you? weird!), then you know that the claim “GM foods are to liberals what climate change is to conservatives!!” is an internet meme with no genuine empirical substance .  I’ve reported data multiple times showing that GM foods do not meaningfully divide ordinary members of the public along partisan or cultural lines.  The idea that they do is not a fact but a “rule” that one must accept to play a parlor game (one much less interesting than “MAPKIA! “) that consists in coming up with just-so explanations for non-existent trends in public opinion .

But I thought, hey, let’s give the claim that GM foods are politically polarized etc. as sympathetic a trial as possible. Let’s take a look after turning up the resolution of our “cultural risk predisposition” microscope and see if there’s anything going on.

To make what I mean by that a bit clearer, let’s step back and talk about different ways to measure latent risk predispositions .

“Cultural cognition” is one framework a person genuinely interested in facts about risk perceptions can use to operationalize the hypothesis that motivated reasoning shapes individuals’ perceptions of culturally or politically contested risks.

What’s distinctive about cultural cognition — or at least most distinctive about it — is how it specifies the latent motivating disposition.  Building on Douglas and Wildvasky’s “cultural theory of risk,” the cultural cognition framework posits that individuals will assess evidence (all kinds, from the inferences they draw from empirical data to the impressions they form with their own senses ) in a manner that reinforces their connection to affinity groups, whose members share values or cultural worldviews that can be characterized along two dimensions–“hierarchy-egalitarianism” and “individualism-communitarianism.”  Attitudinal scales, consisting of individual survey items, are used to measure the unobservable or latent risk predispositions that “motivate” this style of assessing information.

But there are other ways to operationalize the “motivated reasoning” explanation for conflict over risk.  E.g., one could treat conventional left-right political outlooks as the “motivator,” and measure the predispositions that they generate with valid indicators, such as party identification and self-reported liberal-conservative ideology.

Do that, and in my view you aren’t offering a different explanation for public controversy over risk and like facts. Rather you are just applying a different measurement scheme.

And for the most part, that scheme is inferior to the one associated with cultural cognition. By that, I mean (others might have other criteria for assessment, but to me these are the only ones that are worth any thoughtful person’s time) that the cultural worldview measures of latent risk predispositions have more utility in explainining, predicting, and fashioning prescriptions than does any founded on left-right ideology.

I’ve illustrated this before by showing how much left-right measures understate the degree of cultural polarization that exists among ordinary, relatively nonpartisan members of the public (the vast number who are watching America’s Funniest Pet Videos when tiny audiencies tune in to either Madow or O’Reily) on certain issues, including climate change.

Cultural worldviews are more discerning if one is trying to measure the unobserved or latent group affinities at work in this setting.

But certainly it should be possible to come up with even more discerning measures still. In fact, in between blog posts, that’s all I spend my time on (that and listening to Freddie Mecury albums).

In a previous blog post , I referred to an alternative measurement strategy that I identified with Leiserowtiz’s notion of “interpretive communities.”  In this approach, one measures the latent, shared risk predisposition of the different affinity groups’ members by assessing their risk perceptions directly.  The risk perceptions are the indicators for the scale one forms to explore variance and test hypotheses about its sources and impact.

I formed a set of “interpretive community” measures by running factor analysis on a battery of risk perceptions assessed with the “industrial strength” measure .  The analysis identified two orthogonal latent “factors,” which, based on their respective indicators, I labeled the “public safety” and “social-deviancy” risk predispositions.

How useful is this strategy for explaining, predicting, and forming prescriptions relating to contested risk?