The Liberal Republic of Science, part 4: "A new political science ..."

This is the fourth and final post on The Liberal Republic of Science.

The Liberal Republic of Science is a political regime.

Its animating principle is the mutually supportive relationship of liberal democracy and science. The mode of knowing distinctive of science is possible only in a state that denies any institution the power to resolve by authority questions that admit of engagement by reason. Not only is such a state the only one in which the path of empirical knowledge is likely to remain unobstructed by interest and error; it is the only one in which individuals can be expected to develop the individual habits of mind and the collective practices of intellectual exchange that fuel the permanent cycle of conjecture and refutation that is the engine of science.  

Science reciprocates. It furnishes liberal democratic citizens with an exquisite model of how to think, and with a stunning and stunningly beautiful spectacle of human discovery.  It also supplies them with a stock of knowledge that enables self-governing people to lead safer, healthier, and more prosperous lives than people who are governed by anyone else in any other way.

But there is a paradox -- Popper’s Revenge--built into the constitution of the Liberal Republic of Science. The absence of a single authoritative institution or system for certifying what is known is intrinsic to the conditions that enable us to know collectively so much more than any one of us could ever discern individually. The multiplication of potential certifiers—in the form of aggregations of people converging through the exercise of reason, and the exchange of reasons, on shared ways of life—is a product of the same cultural pluralism that endows us with the dispositions essential to engaging in science’s signature mode of inquiry.  

In such conditions, conflicts among the plural communities of certification (even if rare) are statistically certain to arise.  Because they disable the faculty that reasoning individuals use to know what is known to science, such conflicts compromise the capacity of a democratic society to  make use of the immense knowledge that science furnishes them for securing its members’ welfare. And because they pit against one another groups whose members share identity-defining affinities, such conflicts infuse the public deliberations of the Open Society with antagonistic meanings inimical to liberal neutrality.

But history is not driven by supra-individual “spirits” or by inevitable “laws.” The pluralistic certification of truth is not an inherent contradiction; it is a challenge. In fact, it is a problem—a science communication problem—that can be solved, but by only one means.

Responding to the advent of democratic society, Tocqueville famously called for the creation of a “new political science for a world itself quite new.”

Perfecting the Liberal Republic of Science presents still newer challenges of government.  Overcoming them will require a new political science too: a science of science communication aimed at equipping democratic societies with the knowledge, with the institutions, and with the mores necessary to sustain a deliberative environment in which culturally diverse citizens reliably converge on the best available understandings of how to achieve their common ends. 

The end!

Nos. One, Two & Three in this series.

The Liberal Republic of Science, part 3: Popper's Revenge....

The politics of risk regulation is marked by a disorienting paradox. 

At no time in history has a society possessed so much knowledge relevant to securing the health, safety, and prosperity of its members.  Yet never has the content of what is collectively known-- from the reality of climate change to the efficacy of the HPV vaccine, from the impact of gun control on crime to the impact of tax cuts on public revenue--been a source of more intense and persistent political conflict.

We live in a liberal democratic society. We are thus free of the violent sectarian struggles that have decimated human societies from the beginning of history, and that continue to rage in those regions still untamed by the pacifying influence of doux commerce.

Yet we remain spectacularly factionalized—not over whose conception of virtue will be forcibly imposed on us by the state, but over whose view of the facts will be credited in the democratic processes we use to promulgate policies aimed at securing the wellbeing of all.

This is Popper’s Revenge—a tension inherent in, and potentially destructive of, the constitution of the Liberal Republic of Science.

In the first of this series of posts on the Liberal Republic of Science, I identified what sort of thing the Liberal Republic Science is: a political regime, or collective way of life animated by a foundational set of commitments that shape not only its institutions of government but also its citizens’ habits of mind and norms of engagement across all domains of social and private life.

In the second, I described the Liberal Republic of Science’s animating idea: the mutually supportive relationship of political liberalism and scientific inquiry.  In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Popper identifies science’s signature way of knowing with the amenability of any claim to permanent empirical challenge.  The vitality of this distinctive mode of inquiry, in turn, presupposes  Popper’s Open Society: only in a state that disclaims the authority to orchestrate collective life in pursuit of rationally ascertained, immutable truths will individuals develop the disputatious and inquisitive habits of mind, and society the competitive norms of intellectual exchange, that fuel the scientific engine of conjecture and refutation.

The cultural polarization we today observe over risks and how to abate them, I now want to argue, is in fact a byproduct of the very same characteristics that make a liberal society conducive to the acquisition of scientific knowledge.

Obviously, the collective knowledge ascertained by science will far exceed what any individual (layperson or scientist) can hope to understand much less verify for him- or herself. As a result, there must be reliable social mechanisms for certifying and transmitting what’s known to science--that is, for certifying and transmitting what’s known to us collectively through science’s signature mode of inquiry.

Popper himself recognized this.  He mocked (gently; he was not ungrateful to the nation that saved him from National Socialism) English sensory empiricism, which asserts that first-hand observation is the only valid foundation for knowledge. What enables the members of a liberal democratic society to participate in the superior knowledge that science conveys is not their “refusal to take anyone one’s word for it” (nullius in verba, the motto of the Royal Society) but rather their reliance on the words of those who will reliably certify as “true” only those claims originating in the use of science’s distinctive mode of knowing.

In a liberal society, however, there will always be a plurality of such truth certifiers.  People naturally acquire their personal knowledge of what’s collectively known within a cultural community, whose members trust and understand each other. The citizens of the Liberal Republic of Science are culturally diverse—historically so.  As the number of facts known to science multiplies, the prospect of disagreement among these plural systems of certification becomes a statistical certainty.

Such conflicts, moreover, feed on themselves. The conspicuous association between opposing positions and opposing groups transforms factual beliefs into emblems of identity.  Policy determinations become referenda—not over the weight of the evidence in support of competing empirical claims but over the honesty and competence of competing cultural constituencies.  Otherwise nonpartisan citizens are impelled to pick sides in what they are now constrained to experience as a “struggle for the soul” of their society.

As deliberations over risk transmute into polarizing forms expressive status conflict, the citizens of the Liberal Republic of Science are denied the two principal goods distinctive of their political regime: policies reliably informed by the immense collective knowledge at their society’s disposal; and state neutrality toward the choices they make, exercising their autonomous reason in common with others, about what counts as a worthy and virtuous way of life.

As I explained in my last post, the nourishment that liberal political culture furnishes scientific inquiry is one half of Liberal Republic of Science’s animating idea. The other is the reciprocal nourishment that science furnishes the cultural of liberal democracy, whose citizens it thrills and inspires and teaches to think.

I acknowledged, too, at the end of the post, that many of you might question my suggestion that the U.S. is a Liberal Republic of Science, precisely because you might doubt my suggestion that the citizens of the U.S. are one in the view that science’s way of knowing is the best one.  I surmised that you might perceive instead that the U.S. is in fact a “house divided” between those who want to perfect the Liberal Republic of Science and those who want to destroy it.

My claim now is that this very perception itself is part and parcel of Popper’s Revenge.

The conflict over climate change is not one between those who accept science’s way of knowing and those who don’t.

The conflict over nuclear power is not one between those who accept science’s way of knowing and those who don’t.

The conflict over the HPV vaccine, over guns, over GM foods—none of these is between those who accept science’s way of knowing and those who don’t.

Those on both sides of all these issues mistakenly think that this is so only because of the dynamics I have been discussing.  And making these mistakes, they predictably form the mistaken perception that those who disagree with them on these issues are anti-science.

But this last mistake is arguably the one that harms them the most. For it is the barrier that Popper’s Revenge puts in the way of their seeing that they are all citizens of the Liberal Republic of Science that obscures their apprehension of the interest they share in using the science of science communication to perfect this very defect in their political regime.

That will the the topic of my final post in this series.

References

Kahan, D.M. (2012). Cognitive Bias and the Constitution of the Liberal Republic of Science, CCP working paper.

Kahan, D. M. (2007). The Cognitively Illiberal State. Stan. L. Rev., 60, 115-154. 

Popper, K. R. (2002). On the Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance, in Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge, pp. 43-86. New York,: Routledge.

Nos. One, Two & Four in this series.

The Liberal Republic of Science, part 2: What is it?!

This is the second in what will be four posts (I think; post-number forecasting is not yet as reliable a science as sabermetrics or meteorology)  on the Liberal Republic of Science.

The first one set the groundwork by discussing the concept of a political regime, which in classical philosophy refers to a type of government characterized by an animating principle that not only determines the structure of its sovereign authority but also pervasively orients the attitudes and interactions of its citizens throughout all domains of social and private life.

The Liberal Republic of Science is a political regime. Its animating principle is the mutually supportive relationship—indeed, the passionately reciprocal envelopment—of political liberalism and scientific inquiry.  That’s the point I now want to develop.

The essential place to start, of course, is with Popper.  It is a testament not to the range of his intellectual interests but rather to the obsessive singularity of them that Popper wrote both The Logic of Scientific Discovery and The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Logic, the greatest contribution ever to the philosophy of science, famously identifies a state of competitive provisionality as integral to science’s signature mode of knowing.  For science, no one has the authority to say definitively what is known; and what is known is never known with finality.  The basic epistemological claim science makes is that our only basis for confidence in a claim about how the world works is its ongoing success in repelling any attempts to empirically refute it.  We must understand "truth” to be nothing more than the currently best-supported hypothesis.

Open Society—a paean to liberal philosophy and liberal institutions—identifies liberal democracy as the only form of political life conducive to this way of knowing.  Systems governed by managerial programs calibrated to one or another rationalist vision invariably erect barriers of interest and error in the path of scientific inquiry. But even more fundamentally, because they authoritatively certify truth, and thereafter bureaucratically mould social life to it, such systems stifle formation of the individual dispositions and social norms that fuel the engine of scientific discovery.

The nourishing environment that liberal democratic culture supplies for science is thus one part of the idea of the Liberal Republic of Science. The other is the reciprocal nourishment that science furnishes the culture of liberal democracy.

The citizens of the Liberal Republic of Science remark their dedication to science’s distinctive way of knowing throughout all spheres of life, sometimes in overt and openly celebratory ways but even more often and more significantly in wholly unnoticed ways, through ingrained patterns of behavior and unconscious habits of mind.

They naturally—more or less unquestioningly, as if it hadn’t even occurred to them that there was any alternative—seek guidance from those whose expertise reflects science’s signature mode of knowing when they are making personal decisions (about their health, e.g.).

They accept—consciously; if you suggested they shouldn’t do this, they’d think you were mad—that public policy relating to their common welfare (e.g., laws aimed at discouraging criminality—or at assuring efficiently operating capital markets) should be informed by the best available scientific evidence.

They seek as best they can to think for themselves in a manner that credits science’s distinctive way of knowing. That is, they believe that the best way to answer a personal question—which automobile should I buy? Which candidate should I vote for President? Who should I marry?—is to gather up and weight relevant pieces of evidence. The notion that just this is the right way for an individual to use his or her mind is also very distinctive historically, and still far from universal across societies today.

And finally, the citizens of the Liberal Republic of Science intrinsically value science’s way of knowing. 

They admire those who are excellent at it.

The are thrilled and awed by what this way of knowing reveals to them about the way the world works.

They expend significant collective resources to promote it, not just because they see doing so as a prudent investment that will make their lives go better (although they are stunningly confident that this is so), but because it seems right to them to enable the form of human excellence that it displays, and to create the sort of remarkable insight that it generates….

Do we, in the U.S., live in the Liberal Republic of Science?

It is in the nature of political regimes to be imperfectly realized.  Or to put it differently it is in the nature of being a political regime of a particular sort for its members to recognize the ways in which their society’s institutions and norms do not perfectly reflect that regime’s animating idea, and to feel urgently impelled to remedy such imperfections.  I mentioned in the last post, e.g., Lincoln’s understanding of the imperfection of the American political regime as one animated by the idea of equality, and what this meant for him in confronting political compromises to avert the Civil War.

So while I am troubled by the many ways in which the U.S. only imperfectly embodies the idea of the Liberal Republic of Science, the imperfections do not trouble me in classifying the U.S. as a regime of this sort. (Certainly it is not the only one, either!)

I do anticipate, though, that some of the readers of this post might disagree—not because they are uncommitted to the idea of the Liberal Republic of Science but because they are unconvinced that their fellow citizens actually are.  In fact, they perceive that the U.S. is bitterly divided between a constituency that supports the Liberal Republic of Science and another that is implaccably hostile to it--that a civil war of sorts might even be looming over the role of science in American democracy.

This is a misperception I need to take up. And I will in the next post, in which will I address “Popper’s Revenge,” a paradox inherent in, and potentially destructive of, the constitution of the Liberal Republic of Science.

References

Popper, K. R. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. New York,: Basic Books.

Popper, K. R. (1945). The open society and its enemies. London,: G. Routledge & sons. 

Nos. One, Three & Four in this series.

The Liberal Republic of Science, part 1: the concept of “political regime”

I sometimes refer to the Liberal Republic of Science, and a thoughtful person has asked me to explain just what it is I’m talking about.  So I will.

But I want to preface my account—which actually will unfold over the course of several posts—with a brief discussion of the sort of explanation I will give.

One of the useful analytical devices one can find in classical political philosophy  is the concept of “political regimes.” "Political regimes” as used there doesn't refer to identifiable ruling groups within particular nations (“the Ceausescu regime,” etc.)—the contemporary connotation of this phrase—but rather to distinctive forms of government.

Moreover, unlike classification schemes used in contemporary political science, the classical notion of  “political regimes” doesn’t simply map such forms of government onto signature institutions (“democracy = majority rule”; “communism = state ownership of property,” etc.). Instead, it explicates such forms with respect to foundational ideas and commitments, which are understood to animate social and political life—determining, certainly, how sovereign power is allocated across institutions, but also deeply pervading all manner of political and even social and private life.

If one uses this classification strategy, then, one doesn’t try to define forms of government with reference to some set of necessary and sufficient characteristics. Rather one interprets them by elaborating how their most conspicuous features manifest their animating principle, and also how their animating principle makes sense of seemingly peripheral and disparate, or maybe in fact very salient and connected but otherwise puzzling, elements of them.

In addition, while one can classify political regimes in seemingly general, ahistorical terms—as, say, Aristotle did in discussing the moderate vs. the immoderate species of “democracy,” “aristocracy” vs. “oligarchy,” and “monarchy” vs. “tyranny”—the concept can be used too to explicate the way of political life distinctive of a particular historical or contemporary society. Tocqueville, I’d say, furnished these sorts of accounts of the American political regime in Democracy in America and the French one prior to the French Revolution in L’ancien Régime, although he admittedly saw both as instances of general types (“democracy,” in the former case, “aristocracy” in the latter).

For another, complementary account of the “American political regime,” I’d highly recommend Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959). Jaffa was joining issue with other historians, who at the time were converging on a view of Lincoln as a zealot for opposing the pragmatic Stephen Douglas, who these historians believed could have steered the U.S. clear of the Civil War.  Jaffa depicts Lincoln as motivated to preserve the Union as a political regime defined by an imperfectly realized principle of equality. Because Lincoln saw any extension of slavery into the Northwest Territories as incompatible with the American political regime's animating principle, he viewed Douglas’s compromise of  “popular sovereignty” as itself destructive of the Union.

So what is the Liberal Republic of Science?  It’s a political regime, the animating principle of which is the mutually supportive relationship of  political liberalism and scientific inquiry, or of the Open Society and the Logic of Scientific Discovery.

Elaboration of that idea will be the focus of part 2 of this series.

The distinctive challenge that the Liberal Republic of Science faces—one that stems from an paradox intrinsic to its animating principle—will be the subject of part 3.

And the necessary role that the science of science communication plays in negotiating that challenge will be the theme of part 4.

So long!

References

Aristotle (1958). The politics of Aristotle (E. Barker, Trans.). New York,: Oxford University Press. 

Cantor, P. A. (1995). Literature and Politics: Understanding the Regime. PS: Political Science and Politics, 28(2), 192-195.
 

Jaffa, H. V. (1959). Crisis of the house divided; an interpretation of the issues in the Lincoln-Douglas debates (1st ed.). Garden City, N.Y.,: Doubleday.

Tocqueville, A. de (1969). Democracy in America (G. Lawrence, Trans.; J.P. Mayer, ed.). Garden City, N.Y.,: Doubleday.

Tocqueville, A. de (2011). Tocqueville : The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution (J. Elster & A. Goldhammer, Trans.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Nos. Two, Three & Four in this series.

Science communication & judicial-neutrality communication look the same to me

Gave a talk at cool conference on Supreme Court and the Public at Chicago-Kent Law School. Co-panelists included Dan Simon & "evil Dr. Nick" Scurich, my colleague Tom Tyler, and Carolyn Shapiro, all of whom gave great presentations. This is a set of notes I prepared the morning of the talk; I spoke extemporarneously, but made essentially these points. Slides here.

What is the relationship between the public communication of science and the public communication of judicial neutrality? When I look at them, I see the same thing--& so should you.

 1. Pattern recognition is an unconscious (or preconscious) process in which phenomena are matched with previously acquired stores of mental prototypes in a way that enables a person reliably to perform one or another sort of mental or physical operation. The classic example is chick sexing: day-old chicks, whose fuzzy genitalia admit of no meaningful visual differences, are unerringly segregated by gender by trained professionals who have learned to see the difference between males & females but who can't actually say how.

In fact, though, pattern recognition is not all that exotic & is super ubiquitous: it's the form of cognition ordinary people use to discern others' emotions, chess grand masters to identify good moves, intelligence analysts to interpret aerial photos, forensic auditors to detect fraud, etc.

I'm going to be asserting that pattern recognition is part of both expert scientific judgment and expert legal judgment, & that it is the gap between expert and public prototypes that generates conflict about both.

2. Margolis's masterpiece set Patterns, Thinking & Cognition & Dealing with Risk link divergence between public and expert risk assessments to breakdowns in the translation of insights gleaned by use of the experts' pattern-recognition faculties into information the public can understand using theirs.

a. For Margolis, all cognition is a form of pattern recognition. Expert judgment consists in the acquisition and reliable accessing of distinctive inventories of patterns—or prototypes—that are suited to the experts’ domain. Necessarily, members of the public lack those prototypes, and if unaided by experts use alternative, lay ones to make sense of phenomena from that domain.

b. The point of science communication is to make it possible for members of the public to be guided by the experts. It does that not by making it possible for members of the public to know what scientists know; that’s not possible because members of the pubic lack the prototypes that would enable them to see what the scientists see. Instead, science communication engages another, distinct set of prototypes that members of the public use to recognize who knows what about what.   The transmission of expert knowledge to nonexperts is mediated by another set of pattern-recognition enabling prototypes that members of the public use to figure out who knows what about what. This mediating system of prototypes is usually very reliable – people are, in effect, experts at figuring out who the experts are and what they are trying to say.

c. Nevertheless, there are some sorts of identifiable, recurring confounds  that block or distort the processing of transmission of scientific knowledge to the public.  The problem isn’t that the public can’t “understand” what the experts know – i.e., see what the experts see – because that’s always the case, even when the public converges on the positions supported by expert judgment. Rather, the difficulty is that the mediating prototypes are not up to the task of enabling the public to see “who knows what about what.” The result is a state of discord between the judgments  experts make when they are guided by their specially calibrated pattern-recognition faculties and the ones laypeople are constrained to form on the bias of their lay prototypes relating to the matters in question.

d. Cultural cognition fits this basic account. People gain access to what’s known to science through affinity networks that certify “who knows what about what.” Those networks are plural; but they usually converge in their certifications (ones that persistently misled their members on who knows what about what would not last long).  Sometimes, however, facts that admit of scientific investigation—like whether the earth is heating up, or whether the HPV vaccine will cause girls to engage in promiscuous unprotected sex—get invested with contentious social meanings that pit the certifying groups into a state of opposition. In that case, diverse people will be in a state of persistent disagreement about those facts—not because they lack scientific knowledge; they don’t have that on myriad other facts on which there is no such disagreement—but because the faculties they use (reliably, most of the time) to identify who knows what about what are generating conflicting answers across diverse groups.

3. Law is parallel in all respects.

a.  Legal reasoning consists in an expert system of pattern recognition.  This is what Llewellyn had in mind when he described “situation sense.” Llewellyn, it’s true, famously discounted the power of analytical or deductive reasoning to generate legal results. But for him the interesting question was how it was that there was such a high degree of predictability in the law, such a high degree of consensus among lawyers and judges, nonetheless. “Situation sense,” a perceptive faculty that is calibrated by education and professionalization and that reliably enables lawyers and judges to conform fact patterns to a common set of “situation types” (i.e., prototypes), was Llewellyn’s answer.

b.  Members of the public lack lawyers’ situation sense. They do not “understand legal reasoning” not because they are deficient in some analytical faculty but because they lack the specialized inventory of professional prototypes that lawyers enjoy, and thus do not see what lawyers see. If they are to converge on what lawyers know, then, they must do so through the use of some valid set of mediating prototypes that enable their pattern-recognition faculty reliably to apprehend “who knows what about what” in law.

c. Just as there are instances in which antagonistic cultural resonances block effective use of the mediating prototypes that laypeople use to discern expert scientific judgment, so there are ones in which antagonistic cultural resonances block effective use of mediating prototypes that laypeople must necessarily use to discern expert legal judgment. When that happens, there will be persistent conflict among diverse groups of people on whether legal controversies are being correctly or neutrally resolved.  See “They Saw a Protest.”

4. The law’s neutrality communication problem admits of the same solution as science’s expertise communication problem.

a. Public controversies over science are not intractable. They do not reflect inherent defects or flaws in science; nor do they reflect the (admitted) limits on the capacity of the public to comprehend what scientists know. Rather, they are a reflection of gaps or breakdowns in the mediating prototypes that  members of the public normally make reliable use of to discern who knows what about.  The science of science communication involves identifying those gaps and fixing them.

b. To the extent that the neutrality communication involves the same sort of difficult as the expertise communication problem, then it’s reasonable to surmise the neutrality communication problem is tractable. The idea that public conflict over law validity is an inescapable consequence of the indeterminacy of law and the resulting “ideological” nature of decisionmaking is as extravagant as saying that disagreements over science are based on the inherent “ideological bias” or indeterminacy of scientific methods. Members of the public necessarily apprehend the validity of law through mediating prototypes. Through scientific study, it should possible to identify what those mediating prototypes are, where the holes are gaps are in those prototypes, and how to remedy those gaps.

 c. The advent of the science of science communication began with the recognition that it was wrong to think there was no need for one. Doing valid science and communicating science to the public are different things. Doing valid science actually does involve communication, of course, of the sort that scientists engage in to share knowledge with each other. But that communication works by engaging the stock of prototypes to which the scientists’ faculty of expert pattern recognition is specifically calibrated. Supplying that information to the public doesn’t help them to know what scientists know—or see what scientists see—because they lack the scientists’ inventory of prototypes.  Effective public science communication, then, consist in supplying information that engages the mediating prototypes that enable nonexperts to reliably figure out who knows what about what. Like any other form of expert judgment, moreover, expert science communication involves the adroit use of pattern recognition faculties calibrated to prototypes that suit the task at hand.

d. The first step in the development of a science of legal validity communication must likewise be the recognition that there is a need for it. Legal professionals are in much broader agreement about what constitutes neutral or valid determination of cases than are ordinary members of the public. But just as the validity of science from the (pattern-recognition-informed) point of view of the scientist does not communicate the validity of science to the public, so the neutrality of law from the pattern-recognition-informed point of view of lawyers does not communicate the neutrality of law to laypeople. Judges communicate the bases of their decisions, of course. But the sort of communication that judges use to communicate the validity of their decisions is aimed at demonstrating the validity of their decisions to legal professionals; it does that by successfully engaging the prototypes that inform legal situation sense. That sort of communication won’t reliably enable members of the public to perceive the validity of the law, because the public lacks situation sense and thus cannot see what lawyers see.  Like the existence of public conflict over science, the existence of public conflict over law is a product of the breakdown of the mediating prototypes that members of the public must rely on to know who knows what about what. Dispelling the latter conflict, too, involves acquiring knowledge scientific knowledge about how to construct and repair mediating prototypes. And as with the communication of science validity, the communication of law validity will require the development of expert judgment guided by the adroit use of pattern recognition faculties calibrated specifically at that.

Is cultural cognition the same thing as (or even a form of) confirmation bias? Not really; & here’s why, and why it matters

Often people say, “oh, you're talking about confirmation bias!” when they hear about one of our cultural cognition studies.  That’s wrong, actually.

Do I care? Not that much & not that often. But because the conflating of these two dynamics can actually interfere with insight, I'll spell out the difference.

Start with a Bayesian model of information processing—not because it is how people do or (necessarily, always) should think but because it supplies concepts, and describes a set of mental operations with reference to which we can readily identify and compare the distinctive features of cognitive dynamics of one sort or another.

Bayses’s Theorem supplies a logical algorithm for aggregating new information or evidence with one’s existing assessment of the probability of some proposition. It says, in effect, that one should update or revise one’s existing belief in proportion to how much more consistent the new evidence is with the proposition (or hypothesis) in question than it is with some alternative proposition (hypothesis).

Under one formalization, this procedure involves multiplying one’s “prior” estimate, expressed in odds that the proposition is true, by the likelihood ratio associated with the new information to form one’s revised estimate, expressed in odds, that the proposition is true.  The “likelihood ratio”—how many times more consistent the new information is with the proposition in question—represents the weight to be assigned to the new evidence. 

An individual displays confirmation bias when she selectively credits or discredits evidence based on its consistency with what she already believes. In relation to the Bayesian model, then, the distinctive feature of confirmation bias consists in an entanglement between a person’s prior estimate of a proposition and the likelihood ratio she assigns to new evidence: rather than updating her existing estimate based on the new evidence, she determines the weight of the new evidence based on her prior estimate.  Depending on how strong the degree of this entanglement is, she’ll either never change her mind or won’t change it as quickly as she would have if she had been determining the weight of the evidence on some basis independent of her “priors.”

Cultural cognition posits that people with one or another set of values have predispositions to find particular propositions relating to various risks (or related facts) more congenial than other propositions. They thus selectively credit or discredit evidence in patterns congenial to those predispositions. Or in Bayesian terms, their cultural predispositions determine the likelihood ratio assigned to the new evidence.  People not only will be resistant to changing their minds under these circumstances; they will also be prone to polarization—even when they evaluate the same evidence—because people’s cultural predispositions are heterogeneous.

See how that’s different from confirmation bias? Both involve conforming the weight or likelihood ratio of the evidence to something collateral to the probative force that that evidence actually has in relation to the proposition in question. But that collateral thing is different for the two dynamics: for confirmation bias, it’s what someone already believes; for cultural cognition, it’s his or her cultural predispositions.

But likely you can also now see why the two will indeed often look the “same.” If as a result of cultural cognition, someone has previously fit all of his assessments of evidence to his cultural predispositions, that person will have “priors” supporting the proposition he is predisposed to believe. Accordingly, when such a person encounters new information, that person will predictably assign the evidence a likelihood ratio that is consistent with his priors. 

However, if cultural cognition is at work, the source of the entanglement between the individuals’ priors and the likelihood ratio that this person is assigning the evidence is not that his priors are influencing the weight (likelihood ratio) he assigns to the evidence. Rather it is that the same thing that caused that individual’s priors—his cultural predisposition—is what is causing that person’s biased determination of the weight the evidence is due. So we might want to call this "spurious confirmation bias."

Does this matter?  Like I said, not that much, not that often.

But here are three things you’ll miss if you ignore everything I just said.

1. If you just go around attributing everything that is a consequence of cultural cognition to confirmation bias, you will not actually know—or at least not be conveying any information about—who sees what and why. A curious person observes a persistent conflict over some risk—like, say, climate change; she asks you to explain why that group sees things one way that another. If you say, “because they disagree, and as a result construe the evidence in a way that supports what they already believe,” she is obviously going to be unsatisfied: all you’ve done is red scribe the phenomenon she just asked you to explain.  If you can identify the source of the  bias in a person’s cultural predisposition, you’ll be able to give this curious questioner an account of why the groups found their preferred beliefs congenial to begin with—and also who the different people in these groups are independently of what they already believe about the risk in question.

2. If you reduce cultural cognition to confirmation bias, you won’t have a basis for predicting or explaining polarization in response to a novel risk.  Before people have encountered and thought about a new technology, they are unlikely to have views about it one way, and any beliefs they do have are likely to be noisy—that is, uncorrelated with anything in particular. If, however, they have cultural predispositions on risks of a certain type, then we can predict such people will, when they encounter new information about this technology, assign opposing likelihood ratios to it and end up polarized!

CCP did exactly that in a study of nanotechnology. In it, we divided subjects who were largely unfamiliar with nanotechnology into two groups, one of whom was supplied no information other than a very spare definition and another of whom was supplied balanced information on nanotechnology risks and benefits. Hierarchical individualists and egalitarian communitarians in the “no information” group had essentially identical views of the risks and benefits of nanotechnology. But those who were supplied with balanced information polarized along lines consistent with their predispositions toward environmental and technological risks generally.

“Confirmation bias” wouldn’t have predicted that; it wouldn’t have predicted anything at all.

3. Finally and likely most important, if you stop understanding what the causal mechanisms are at the point at which cultural cognition looks like confirmation bias, you won’t be able to formulate any hypotheses about remedies.

Again, confirmation bias describes what’s happening—people are fitting their assessment of evidence to what they already believe. From that, nothing in particular follows about what to do if one wants to promote open-minded engagement with information that challenges peoples’ existing perceptions of risk. 

Cultural cognition, in contrast, explains why what’s happening is happening: people are motivated to fit assessments of evidence to their predispositions.  Based on that explanation, it is possible to specify what’s needed to counteract the bias: ways of presenting information or otherwise creating conditions that erase the antagonism between individuals’ cultural predispositions and their open-minded evaluation of information at odds with their priors.

CCP has done experimental studies showing how to do that.  One of these involved the use of culturally identifiable experts, whose credibility with lay people who shared their values furnished a cue that promoted open-minded engagement with information, and hence a revision of beliefs about, the risks of the HPV vaccine.

In another, we looked at how to overcome bias on climate change evidence.  We surmised that the positive that individuals culturally predisposed to dismiss evidence of climate change engaged that information more open-mindedly when they learned that geoengineering and not just carbon-emission limits were among the potential remedies. The cultural resonances of geoengineering as a form of technological innovation might help to offset in hierarchical individualists (the people who really like nanotechnology when they learn about it) the identity-threatening resonances associated with climate change evidence, the acceptance of which is ordinarily understood to require limiting technology, markets and industry. Our finding corroborated that surmise: individuals who learned about geoengineering responded more open-mindedly to evidence on the risks of climate change than those who first learned only about the value of carbon-emission limits.

Nothing in the concept of “confirmation bias” predicts effects like these, either, and that means it’s less helpful than an explanation like cultural cognition if we are trying to figure out what to do to solve the science communication problem.

Does this mean that I or you or anyone else should get agitated when people conflate cultural cognition and confirmation bias? 

Nope. It means only that if there’s reason to think that the conflation will prevent the person who makes it from learning something that we think he or she would value understanding, then we should help that individual to see the difference with an explanation akin to the one I have just offered.

Some references

Rabin, M. & Schrag, J.L. First Impressions Matter: A Model of Confirmatory Bias. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 114, 37-82 (1999).

Kahan, D.M. in Handbook of Risk Theory: Epistemology, Decision Theory, Ethics and Social Implications of Risk. (eds. R. Hillerbrand, P. Sandin, S. Roeser & M. Peterson) 725-760 (Springer London, Limited, 2012).

Kahan, D., Braman, D., Cohen, G., Gastil, J. & Slovic, P. Who Fears the HPV Vaccine, Who Doesn’t, and Why? An Experimental Study of the Mechanisms of Cultural Cognition. Law Human Behav 34, 501-516 (2010).

Kahan, D.M., Braman, D., Slovic, P., Gastil, J. & Cohen, G. Cultural Cognition of the Risks and Benefits of Nanotechnology. Nature Nanotechnology 4, 87-91 (2009).

NARP: National Adaptation and Resiliency Plan -- it both pays for & "frames" itself

Imagine what NYC & NJ might look like today if we had had a "National Adaptation and Resiliency Plan" as part of the stimulus measures passed by Congress in 2008 & 2009....

Or if that's too hard to do, here's something to help you imagine what things will look like -- over & over again, for cities spanning the gulf coast & stretching up the northeast corridor --if we don't do it now:

A national program to fund the buiding of sea walls, installation of storm surge gates, "hardening" of our utility & transportation infrastructure & the like makes real economic sense.

Not only would such a program undeniably generate a huge number of jobs. It would actually reduce the deficit!

The reason is that it costs less to adopt in advance the measures that it will take to protect communities from extreme-weather harm than it will cost in govt aid to help unprotected ones recover after the fact.  Measures that likely could have contained most of the damage from Sandy inflicted on NYC & NJ, e.g., could in fact have been adopted at a fraction of what must now be spent to clean up and repair the damage.

Here's another thing: People of all political & cultural outlooks are already engaged with the policy-relevant science on adapation and are already politically committed to acting on it. 

There's been a lot of discussion recently about how to "frame" Sandy to promote engagement with climate science.

Well, there's no need to resort to "framing" if one focuses on adaptation. How to deal with the extremes of nature is something people in every vulnerable community are already very used to talking about and take seriously. From Florida to Virginia to Colorado to Arizona to California to New York--they were already talking about adaptation before Sandy for exactly that reason. 

Nor does one have to make any particular effort to recruit or create "credible" messengers to get people to pay attention to the science relating to adaptation. They are already listening to their neighbors, their municipal  officials, and even their utility companies, all of whom are telling them that there's a need to do something, and to do it now.

During the campaign (thank goodness it's over!), we kept hearing debate about who "built that."

But everyone knows that it's society, through collective action, that builds the sort of public goods needed to protect homes, schools, hospitals, and business from foreseeable natural threats like floods and wildfires.

Everyone knows, too, that it's society, through collective action, that rebuilds communities that get wiped out by these sorts of disasters.

The question is not who, but when -- a question the answer to which determines "how much."

Let's NARP it in the bud!

New paper: Cognitive Bias & the Constitution of Liberal Republic of Science

So here's a working paper that knits together themes that span CCP investigations of risk perception, on one hand, & of legal decisionmaking, on other, & bangs the table in frustration on what I see as the "big" normative question: what sort of posture should courts, lawmakers & citizens generally adopt toward the danger that cultural cognition poses to liberal principles of self-government? I don't really know, you see; but I pretend to, in the hope that the deficiencies in my answers combined with my self-confidence in advancing them will provoke smart political philosophers to try to do a better job.

Abstract: This essay uses insights from the study of risk perception to remedy a deficit in liberal constitutional theory—and vice versa. The deficit common to both is inattention to cognitive illiberalism—the threat that unconscious biases pose to enforcement of basic principles of liberal neutrality. Liberal constitutional theory can learn to anticipate and control cognitive illiberalism from the study of biases such as the cultural cognition of risk. In exchange, the study of risk perception can learn from constitutional theory that the detrimental impact of such biases is not limited to distorted weighing of costs and benefits; by infusing such determinations with contentious social meanings, cultural cognition forces citizens of diverse outlooks to experience all manner of risk regulation as struggles to impose a sectarian orthodoxy. Cognitive illiberalism is a foreseeable if paradoxical consequence of the same social conditions that make a liberal society conducive to the growth of scientific knowledge on risk mitigation. The use of scientific knowledge to mitigate the threat that cognitive illiberalism poses to those very conditions is integral to securing the constitution of the Liberal Republic of Science. 

Download paper

Hey, the problem *isn't* that people are irrational, proof #6276: Prop 37 fails in Calif

From Andy Revkin on dotearth:

California’s Proposition 37, or #Prop37 as it was known on Twitter, failed last night by a substantial margin — 53 percent to 47 percent. The ballot initiative would have required labeling for some genetically engineered foods. (Click here for an illuminating interactive county-by-county map of the vote. Upscale urban and coastal regions wanted it; inland areas mostly rejected it.)

As I said on Tumblr this morning, I’m glad that the sloppy, unscientific andprotectionist initiative failed, but glad an important discussion of transparency in food sourcing has begun....

There’s more on Dot Earth on relevant issues....

It's journal club time (episode 391)! Lewandowsky et al. on scientific consensus

Thanks to the many friends who sent me emails, made late night phone calls, or showed up at my front door (during the time when the storm had knocked out internet & phone service) to make sure I saw Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Vaughan's The pivotal role of perceived scientific consensus in acceptance of science in Nature Climate Change. It's a really cool paper!

LGV present observational and experimental evidence relating to public perceptions of scientific consensus on climate change and other issues. CCP did a study on scientific consensus a couple yrs ago,  -- Kahan, D.M., Jenkins-Smith, H. & Braman, D. Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus. J. Risk Res. 14, 147-174 (2011)--which is one of the reasons my friends wanted to be sure I saw this one.  

The paper presents two basic findings. I'll say something about each one.

Finding 1: Perceptions of scientific consensus determine public beliefs about climate change--and in essentially the same way that they determine it on other risk issues.

In the observational study, the respondents (200 individuals who were solicted to participate in person in downtown Perth, Australia) indicated their beliefs about (a) the link between human CO₂ emissions and climate change (anthropogenic global warming or "AGW"), (b) the link between the HIV virus and AIDS, and (c) the link between smoking and lung cancer.  The respondents also estimated the degree to which scientists believed in such links. LGV then fit a structural equation model to the data and found that a single "latent" factor -- perception of scientific consensus with respect to the link in question -- explained the respondents' beliefs, and "fit" the data better than models that posited independent relationships between respondents' beliefs and their perceptions of scientific consensus on these matters. So basically, people believe what they think experts believe about all these risks.

Surprised? "Of course not. That's obvious!"

Shame on you, if that is how you reacted. It would have been just as "obvious!" I think, if they had found that perceptions of scientific consensus didn't explain variance in perceptions of beliefs in AGW, or that such perceptions bear a relationship to AGW distinct from the ones on other risks. That's because lots of people believe that skepticism about climate change is associated with unwillingness to trust or believe scientists. If that were true, then then the difference between skeptics and believers wouldn't be explained by what they think scientific consensus is; it would be explained by their willing to defer to that consensus.

Most social science consists in deciding between competing plausible conjectures. In the case of climate change conflict, two plausible conjectures are (1) that people are divided on the authority of science and (2) that people agree on the authority of science but disagree about what science is saying on climate change. LGV furnish more evidence more supportive of (2) than (1). (BTW, if you are curious about how divided Australians are on climate change, check this out.)

from Kahan, Jenkins-Smith & Braman (2011)In that regard, moreover, their finding is exactly in line with the CCP one. Using a large (N = 1500) nationally representative sample of US adults, we measured perceptions of scientific consensus on climate change, nuclear power risks, and gun control.  These are highly contentious issues, on which American citizens are culturally divided. Nevertheless, we found that no cultural group perceives that the view that is predominant among its own members is contrary to scientific consensus. (We also found that all the groups were as likely to be mistaken as correct about scientific consensus across the run of issues, at least if we treated the "expert national consensus reports" of the National Academy of Sciences as the the authority on what that consensus is.)

So next time you hear someone saying "climate skeptics are anti-science," "the climate change controversy reflects the diminishing authority of/trust in scientists" etc., say "oh, really? What's your evidence for that? And how does it relate to the LGV and CCP studies?"

Finding no. 2: When advised that there is overwhelming scientific consensus in favor of AGW, people are more likely to believe in AGW -- and this goes for "individualists," just like everyone else.

The experiment subjects (100 individuals also solicited to participate in person in Perth, Australia) indicated their AGW beliefs after being randomly assigned to one of two conditions: a "consensus information" group, which was advised by the experimenters that there is overwhelming scientific consensus (97%) on AGW; and a "no information" group, which was not supplied any information on the state of scientific opinion.  

LGV found, first, that subjects in the consensus-information group were more likely to express belief in AGW. This result adds even more weight to the surmise that popular division over climate change rests not on a division over the authority or credibility of scientists but on a division over perceptions of scientific consensus.

from Lewandowsky, Gignac & Vaugh (2012)Second, LGV found that the impact of consensus-information exposure had a stronger effect on subjects as their scores on a "free-market individualism" worldview measure increased. In other words, relative to their counterparts in the no-information condition, subjects who scored high in "individualism" were particularly likely to form a stronger belief in AGW when exposed to scientific-consensus information.

Although also perfectly plausible, this finding should definitely raise informed eyebrows.

Public opinion on climate change in  Australia, as in the US, is culturally divided.  Consistent with other studies, LGV found that individualism generally predicted skepticism about AGW.

We know (in the sense of "believe provisionally, based on the best available evidence and subject to any valid contrary evidence that might in the future be adduced"; that's all one can ever mean by "know" if one actually gets the logic of scientific discovery) that individualist skepticism toward AGW is not based on skepticism toward the authority of science. Both the observational component of the LGV study and the earlier CCP study support the view that individualists are skeptical because they aren't convinced that there is a scientific consensus on AGW.

Well, why? What explains cultural division over perceptions of scientific consensus?

One conjecture -- let's call it "cultural information skew" or the CIS -- would be that individualists and communitarians (i.e., non-individualists) are exposed to different sources of information, and the information the former receives represents scientific consensus to be lower than does the information the latter receives.

But another conjecture -- call it "culturally biased assimilation" or CBA -- would be that individualists and communitarians are culturally predisposed to credit evidence of scientific consensus selectively in patterns that fit their predisposition to form and maintain beliefs consistent with the ones that prevail within their cultural groups. CBA doesn't imply that individualists and communitarians are necessarily getting the same information. But it would predict disagreement on what consensus is even when people with those predispositoins are supplied with the same evidence.

CBA is one of the mechanisms comprised by cultural cogniton.

from Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, Braman (2011)The same CCP study on scientific consensus furnished experimental evidence supportive of CBA. When subjects were asked to assess whether a scientist (one with elite credentials) was an "expert"-- one whose views should be afforded weight -- subjects tended to say "yes" or "no" depending on whether the featured scientist was depicted as espousing the position consistent with or opposed to the one that predominated among people who shared the subjects' values. 

In other words, subjects recognized the positions of elite scientists as evidence of what "experts" believe selectively, in patterns that fit their cultural predispositions on the risk issues (climate change, nuclear power, and gun control) in question. If this is how people outside the lab treat evidence of what "expert consensus" is, they can be expected to end up culturally divided even when they are exposed to the very same evidence.

At least one more research team has made a comparable finding. Adam Corner, Lorraine Whitmarsh, &  Dimitrios Xenias published an excellent paper a few months ago in Climatic Change that showed that subjects displayed biased assimilation with respect to claims made in newspaper editorials, crediting or discrediting them depending on whether the claims they made were consistent with what the subjects already believed about AGW. That's not culturally biased assimilation necessarily but the upshot is the same:  one can't expect to generate public consensus simply by bombarding people with "more information" on scientific consensus.

The LGV finding, though, appears inconsistent with biased assimilation, cultural or otherwise. The subjects in the consensus-information group were being supplied with evidence -- in the form of information provided by experimenters -- that suggested scientific consensus on AGW is very high (higher, apparently, than even subjects who believe in AGW tend to think).

The CBA prediction would be that more individualistic subjects would simply dismiss such evidence as non-credible -- in the same way that subjects in the CCP study rejected the credibility of scientists who furnished them with information contrary to their cultural predispositions. Having been given no credible information in support of revising their assessment of scientific consensus, LGV's individualist subjects would not (under the CBA view) be expected to revise their assessments of AGW.

But apparently they did! That's a result more in keeping with the "information skew" (CIS) account of why individualists disagree with communitarians.  So it turns out after all that all we need to do is un-skew things. As LGV put it, their study "underscores the vital role of highlighting a scientific consensus when communicating scientific facts," particularly when the underlying issues are "difficult to grasp or are hotly debated or challenge people’s world views."

So do I "accept" LGV as evidence against CBA, and as evidence for being less skeptical about a communication strategy that focuses on simply "highlighting scientific consensus"?  For sure!

But I don't see the evidence as super strong -- and certainly not strong enough to change my mind on these matters given the sum total of the evidence, including but not limited to the previous CCP & Corner et al. studies. In Bayesian terms, I give LGV a likelihood ratio of 0.77 in favor of CBA (or 1.3 in favor of the alternative, CIS hypothesis).

The reason I am not inclined to assign more decisive weight to the LGV finding is that I'm not convinced that people in the real world will be nearly so willing to accept real-world information on scientific consensus as the LGV study apparently were to accept the LGV experimenters' representations.

If individualists in the real world were that receptive to information "highlighting" scientific consensus, I'm very confident they would have gotten the message by now. You really have to be off the grid -- off the planet, even -- not to have heard over & over & over that there is "overwhelming scientific consensus" on AGW. One either accepts that information when it is presented -- on tv, in newspapers, by people one talks to on the street corner -- or one just doesn't. And obviously a good segment of the population just doesn't.

Basically, I'm taking the fact that "some people credit reports of scientific consensus on AGW yet many don't" as the starting point for investigation, and trying to figure out who sees what & why. Again, the CCP experimental result is evidence, in my view, that people are motivated to selectively credit or dismiss evidence of scientific consensus in ways that fit their cultural prepositions (CBA). 

Now in fact, I am surprised that individualistic subjects in the LGV study apparently did put so much confidence in the word of the experimenters. But that they did makes me question whether the situation those subjects were in is really comparable to one of people who are engaging real-world information sources.

I'm inclined to say that in this regard I think the CCP experiment was more realistic. We -- the experimenters -- made no representations to our subjects about the state of scientific consensus. Rather, we showed them some evidence -- a scientist taking a position -- and let them decide for themselves what weight to attach to it. They told us that they viewed what we were showing them as valid evidence of "what experts believe" only when that evidence was consistent with the position that predominated in their group.  

I think that's closer to the situation that we can anticipate people will be in outside the lab when real-world people -- from journalists to advocates to individual scientists to their fellow citizens -- try to "highlight" AGW consensus to them. The expectation that people in that setting will be dismissive toward representations that challenge their predispositions is strongly supported by Corner, Whitmarsh, & Xenias (2012) as well.

Actually, LGV come pretty darn close to saying they agree with this point. They write:

At first glance, our results challenge the results of Kahan and colleagues, that perceived consensus operates like any other fact that is equally subject to dismissal as other evidence surrounding AGW. However, on closer inspection, the study by Kahan did not provide socially-normative information about a consensus (that is, ‘97 out of 100’) but instead presented participants with an informational vignette, attributed to a fictional expert, that either described the risk from climate change or downplayed it. Because this manipulation provided anecdotal rather than social-norming information, it is not surprising that participants rated the source as less trustworthy if the message was worldview dissonant. Normative information, by contrast, is widely assumed to be more resilient to ideologically-motivated dismissal ....

Right: if one provides information that people view as "socially normative" -- i.e., as worthy of being believed --  they'll accept it. But the issue is how to make people view that information as "socially normative" when it is contrary to their cultural predispositions? I just find it implausible to believe that people in the world are as open to real-world evidence (including media accounts & the like) purporting to tell them that they & all their peers are wrong about scientific consensus on AGW as the subjects in the LGV experiment apparently were when the experimenters told them  "97 out of 100 climate scientists believe in AGW." 

My skepticism, however, is not a reason for anyone, including me, to dismiss the significance of LGV's experimental finding.  Only a person who doesn't really understand how empirical study enlarges knowledge would think that one can find a study compelling, insightful, and challenging only if one is "convinced" by the conclusion.

Indeed, if you get how empirical inquiry works, then you'll know how I or LGV or anyone else should respond to the questions I've raised: not by putting this paper aside, but by getting a firm grip on it & trying to reciprocate its contribution to knowledge by doing additional studies that take aim at exactly what is giving me pause here.

E.g., if one embedded the statement "97 out of 100 scientists accept AGW" in a NY Times newspaper story, would individualists react the same way as the ones in this study did? Would they be just as likely to believe that representation as they would be to accept the representation that "only 3" -- or more plausibly for experimental purposes, "only 43" or "only 47"--"of 100" scientists believe in AGW? Would egalitarian communitarian subjects likewise credit just as readily either representation on the state of consensus on AGW? Same for safety of nuclear power?

Show me that -- a result that essentially replicates LGV in a in the Corner, Whitmarsh, & Xenias (2012) design -- & I'll definitely be revising my priors on CBA by a humongous amount!

But I won't have to wait for that result (or the opposite of it) to get the benefits of both knowing more and having more to puzzle over as a result of this paper.

I think it's cool! Read it & tell me what you think!

References

Corner, A., Whitmarsh, L. & Xenias, D. Uncertainty, scepticism and attitudes towards climate change: biased assimilation and attitude polarisation. Climatic Change (2012), on-line advance publication at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0424-6. 

Kahan, D.M., Jenkins-Smith, H. & Braman, D. Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus. J. Risk Res. 14, 147-174 (2011)

Lewandowsky, S., Gignac, G.E. & Vaughan, S. The pivotal role of perceived scientific consensus in acceptance of science. Nature Climate Change (2012).