Key Insight
This is basically what I remember saying last week at William & Mary in a workshop co-sponsored by the Law School & Political Science Dep’t a couple weeks ago. Slides here. 1. An old but continuing debate. The paper you read for this workshop—Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self Government, Behavioural Policy (in press)—originates in a debate that started 10 ... Read more
This is basically what I remember saying last week at William & Mary in a workshop co-sponsored by the Law School & Political Science Dep’t a couple weeks ago. Slides here.
1. An old but continuing debate. The paper you read for this workshop—Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self Government, Behavioural Policy (in press)—originates in a debate that started 10 yrs ago.
A group of us (me, Paul Slovic, Donald Braman, and John Gastil) had written a critique of Cass Sunstein’s then-latest book Laws of Fear . In that book, Sunstein had attributed all manner of public conflict over risk to the public’s overreliance on “System 1” heuristic reasoning. The remedy, in Sunstein’s view, was to shift as much risk-regulatory power as possible to politically insulated expert agencies, whose members could be expected to use conscious, effortful “System 2” information processing.
Our response—Fear of Democracy: A Cultural Evaluation of Sunstein on Risk, Harvard L. Rev ., 119: 1071-1109—criticized Sunstein for ignoring cultural cognition, which of course attributes a large class of such conflicts to the impact that cultural allegiances play in shaping diverse individuals’ risk perceptions.
The costs of ignoring cultural cognition, we argued, were two-fold.
Descriptively, without some mechanism that accounts for individual differences in information processing, Sunstein could not explain why so many risk controversies (from climate change to gun control to nuclear power to the HPV vaccine) involve conflicts not between the public and experts but between different segments of the public.
Prescriptively, the cost of ignoring cultural cognition undermined Sunstein’s central recommendation to hand over all risk-regulated decisionmaking to independent expert risk regulators. That recommendation presupposed that all disagreements between the public and experts originated in the public’s bounded rationality, a defect that it was reasonable to assume could not be remedied by any feasible intervention and that generated factual errors unentitled to normative respect in lawmaking.
Cultural cognition , we argued, showed that public risk perceptions on many issues were rooted in diverse citizens’ values . It wasn’t obvious that expert decisionmaking was “better” than public decisionmaking on risks originating in publicly contested worldviews. Nor was it obvious that conflicts originating in conflicting worldviews could not be resolved by democratic decisionmaking procedures aimed at helping culturally diverse citizens to arrive at shared perceptions of the best available evidence on the dangers that society faces.
In his (very gracious, very intelligent) reply, Cass asserted that cultural cognition could simply be assimilated to his account of the reasoning deficits that distort public decisionmaking: “I argue,” he wrote “that insofar as it produces factual judgments, ‘cultural cognition’ is largely a result of bounded rationality, not an alternative to it.” “[W]hile it is undemocratic for officials to neglect people’s values, it is hardly undemocratic for them to ignore people’s errors of fact” (Sunstein 2006)
This position—that cultural cognition and affiliated forms of motivated reasoning are rooted in “bounded rationality”—is now the orthodox view in decision science (e.g., Lodge & Taber 2013).
But we weren’t sure it was right. As plausible as the claim seemed to be, it hadn’t been empirically tested. So we set out to determine, empirically, whether the forms of information processing that are characteristic of cultural cognition really are properly attributed to overreliance on heuristic reasoning.
2. A ten-year research program. The answer we arrived at over a course of a decade of research was that cultural cognition is not appropriately attributed to overreliance on the form of heuristic information processing associated with “System 1” reasoning. On the contrary, the individuals in whom cultural cognition exerts the strongest effects were those most disposed to use conscious, effortful, “System 2” reasoning.
This conclusion was supported by two testing strategies.
The first was the use of observational or survey methods. In these studies we simply correlated various measures of System 1/System 2 reasoning dispositions with public perceptions of risk and related facts.
If public conflict over risk is a consequence of “bounded rationality,” then one should expect the individuals who evince the strongest disposition to use System 2 reasoning will form risk perceptions more consistent with expert ones than will individuals who evidence the strongest disposition to use System 1 forms of information processing.
In addition, one would expect polarization over contested risk to abate as individuals’ proficiency in System 2 reasoning dispositions increase: those individuals can be expected to “go with the evidence” and refrain from “going with their gut,” which is filled with heuristic-reasoning crap like “what do other people like me think?”
But in fact, those predictions are not borne out by the evidence.
In multiple studies, we found that the individuals who scored highest on one or another measure of the disposition to use conscious, effortful “System 2” information processing were in fact the most polarized on contentious risk issues, including the reality of climate change, the hazards of fracking, the danger of allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns etc. (Kahan, Peters et al. 2012; Kahan 2015; Kahan & Corbin 2016).
Inconsistent with the “bounded rationality” conception, this consistent finding is more consistent with the “cultural cognition thesis,” which posits that individuals can be expected to form identity-protective beliefs and to use all of the cognitive resources at their disposal to do so.
But to nail this inference down, we also conducted a series of experiments , the second type of testing strategy by which we probed Sunstein’s and others’ “bounded rationality” conception of cultural cognition and cognate forms of motivated reasoning.