Deliberations & identity formation

CCP member John Gasitil, along w/ co-authors, has a new article out presenting evidence that highly participatory forms of democratic deliberation promote a distinctive shared identity that transcends more particular and potentially divisive ones, such as those founded on cultural affiliations.

The analysis was largely qualitative: a case study based on impressionistic analyses of transcripts from citizen deliberations associated with the Australian Citizens' Parliament. I know JG has more data on the Australian Citizens' Parliament, including some that admit of more systematic analysis, in hand. Good way to do research since the convergence of results from more interpretive forms of empirical analysis and more quantitative -- if they do indeed converge! -- make the conclusions of both more worthy of being credited.

I know from experience that collective deliberations on baseball are not sufficient to enable Gastil to transcend his partisan cultural identity as a Tigers fan.

Felicetti, A., Gastil, J., Hartz-Karp, & Carson, L. Collective Identity and Voice at the Australian Citizens' Parliament. Journal of Public Deliberation 8, article 5 (2012):

This paper examines the role of collective identity and collective voice in political life. We argue that persons have an underlying predisposition to use collective dimensions, such as common identities and a public voice, in thinking and expressing themselves politically. This collective orientation, however, can be either fostered or weakened by citizens’ political experiences. Although the collective level is an important dimension in contemporary politics, conventional democratic practices do not foster it. Deliberative democracy is suggested as an environment that might allow more ground for citizens to express themselves not only in individual but also in collective terms. We examine this theoretical perspective through a case study of the Australian Citizens’ Parliament, in which transcripts are analyzed to determine the extent to which collective identities and common voice surfaced in actual discourse. We analyze the dynamics involved in the advent of collective dimensions in the deliberative process and highlight the factors—deliberation, nature of the discussion, and exceptional opportunity—that potentially facilitated the rise of group identities and common voice. In spite of the strong individualistic character of the Australian cultural identity, we nonetheless found evidence of both collective identity and voice at the Citizens’ Parliament, expressed in terms of national, state, and community levels. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of those findings for future research and practice of public deliberation.

Ethical guidelines for science communication informed by cultural cognition research

People often express concern to me about the normative implications of research that identifies how cultural cognition influences perception of risk and related facts and how those influences can be anticipated in structuring science communication.

I am glad they are concerned, because I am, too. If I thought that people who consume our research did not reflect on such concerns, I'd be even more worried about what I do. Knowing that others see normative issues here also means that I can share with them my own responses & see if they think I've got things right &/or can do better.

Some "Guidelines" follow. But they are not really "guidelines" in the sense of a codified set of rules or standards (I'm skeptical, in fact, that anything morally complicated can be handled with such things). Rather, they are more like prototypes that when considered together reflect what for me seems the right moral orientation to our work.  Would be happy to receive & post additional "guidelines" of this nature (along w/ any commentary their authors wish to append) & also grateful to receive feedback from anyone who takes issue with any of these or with the attitude/orientation they are meant to convey.

1. No lying. No need for elaboration here, I trust.

2. No manipulation. Likely also self-explanatory, but an example might be useful. Consider how Merck tried to shape public opinion toward Gardasil, its HPV vaccine: by using secret campaign contributions to "persuade" a southern, religious, conservative politician -- Texas Governor Rich Perry -- to issue an executive order mandating vaccination of middle school girls.

It was fine for Merck to try to assure that parents would learn about the benefits of the vaccine. It wasn't even wrong for it to enlist communicators whose cultural identities would make them credible sources of sound information. 

But it should have been open that it was trying to engage people this way.

Obviously, the whole immoral plan blew up in Merck's face--actually generating distrust of Gardasil among a diverse range of cultural groups. Nice work, gun-for-hire, private-industry counterparts of those who study the science of science communication in order to promote the common good!

But the strategy would have been wrong even if Merck had gotten away with it because it was managing the information environment in a way that the message recipients would themselves have resented. They were using people's reasoning, not enabling people's reasoning.

3. Use communication strategies and procedures only to promote engagement with information--not to  induce conclusions. Some people say that cultural-cognition informed communication strategies are a form of "marketing." Fine, I say. So long as what's being marketed is not a preferred position on an issue of science & policy but rather a decisional state or climate in which people who want to make decisions based on the best available scientific information are most likely to take note of and give open-minded consideration to it. 

The HPV-vaccine disaster again supplies an example. Parents of all cultural worldviews want to have the best available information on how to promote the health of their children. It would be perfectly fine, in my view, for a communicator to use cultural cognition research to identify how to promote open-minded engagement with information on the HPV vaccine.  

So if public health officials self-consciously decided to rely on a culturally diverse array of honestly motivated science communicators in order to forestall creation of any perception that positions on the vaccine were aligned asymmetrically with cultural outlooks--that would have been okay.

Also would have been okay to have resisted Merck's stupid, market-driven decision to seek fast-track approval of a girls-only vaccine and to promote inclusion of it on the schedule of mandatory school vaccinations--a marketing strategy that made cultural polarization highly likely.  Parents who love their children wouldn't want to be put into a communication environment in which their honest assessment of the health needs of their daughters or sons would be distorted by culturally antagonistic meanings unrelated to health.

4. Use strategies and procedures to promote engagement only when you have good reason to believe that engagement fits the aims and interests of information recipients. Parents trying to decide what is the best health interests of their children want to engage the information from the mindset that best promotes an accurate assessment of the evidence. But sometimes people want to engage information in a way that reliably connects them to stances that fit their cultural style. Leave them alone; so long as they aren't hurting anyone else, they are entitled to manage their personal information environment in a way that promotes contact with their own conception of the good life.

5. Don't help anyone who has ends contrary to these guidelines. Like, say, a pharmaceutical company that in its drive to make a buck is willing to manipulate people by covertly inducing individuals they trust to vouch for the effectiveness and safety of some treatment.

6.  Do help anyone -- regardless of their cultural worldview -- who is genuinely seeking to promote reflective engagement with information when such engagement fits the interests and aims of recipients. Like, say, a pharmaceutical company that wants to make a buck by openly and without manipulation satisfying the interest that people have in being able to consider scientifically valid information about the effectiveness and risks of a vaccine. 

MPSA climate change panel: report & slides

On Friday I was on a Midwest Political Science Association panel on public opinion & climate change. I presented Tragedy of the Risk Perceptions Commons (slides here). 

Michael Tesler presented interesting data that he argued show that elite rhetoric and not motivated cognition accounts for political divisions on climate change. I have a hard time conjuring the psychological model that would see the two operating independently of each other; to me they are not discrete mechanisms, but steps in a process (elite cues help create/transmit the meanings that then motivate cognition for ordinary individuals) & I wasn't sure exactly how the data supported the inference, but I'm eager to see the write up, at which point I'll either get it or explain why I don't think he is right!

Alexandra Bass presented data on media content to show that values influence climate change perceptions. The presentation was great. But I have to say I don't really get media-content studies in general; they seem to draw inferences the validity of which depend on the ratio of frequency of content to frequency of events in the world--something for which the analyses never present any data. I didn't get a chance, though, to read Bass's paper, so I will, & see if that helps me.

Mathew Nowlin, a member of Hank Jenkins-Smith's amazing risk-perception group at theCenter for Applied Social Research at the University of Oklahoma, presented a cool paper on education, climate change knowledge, and politcal polarization.

Finally, Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo backed data out of the American National Election Study to support the hypothesis that "core political values"-- "such as equality"-- "are an important predictor of climate change attitudes, beyond other standard determinants of political attitudes, like partisanship or ideology." I found the cliam convincing, but I was admittedly predisposed to believe it.

Where is "what does Trayvon Martin case mean, part 3"?

It's coming soon. But not before I get done learning from my class what they think. I also learned a lot from Randy Kennedy's lecture at Leslie College last week. I hope he writes up his lecture so that others can think about his reflections as well (I'm sure I'll say more about Kennedy in "part 3").

Cultural cognition--plus lots of other relevant things-- & nuclear energy: experts *get it*

Came across a great blog on public perceptions of nuclear risk at the Neutron Economy & then found a thoughtful reaction to it at Areva North America: Next Energy Blog.

In addition to being well-crafted and informative, the posts were immensely heartening.

Written by and for people who do work relating to nuclear energy, both displayed keen awareness of the science of public risk perceptions and science communication. (Cultural cognition was  featured, but was--very appropriately--not the only dynamic that was addressed.)  

What's more, rather than the frustrated hand-wringing and finger-pointing that experts (and many others) often (understandably but not helpfully) display when confronted with public controversy over risk, both evinced an uncomplaining, matter-of-fact dedication to making sense of how the public makes sense of the world.

From Neutron Economy:

To summarize - providing education and facts are good, useful even - but on their own insufficient without presenting those facts in a context which engages with the deeply-held values of the audience. To produce actual engagement - and even inducement to support - requires a producing a context of facts compatible with the values of those one is trying to reach. In other words, for the case of nuclear, it means going beyond education and comparative evaluation of risk (again, to emphasize, both of which are valid in and of themselves) and placing these within the framework of how this speaks to the values of the audience....

[I]it is the job of the nuclear professionals (as members of the "technical community") to do our best to provide an accurate technical framework for these evaluations of risk by the public, such that they can make the most sound decisions on risk. Meanwhile it is the job of nuclear communicators and advocates to speak to values, as to produce more fair evaluations of both the benefits and risks of nuclear, particularly in the context of available energy choices.

From Areva North America: Next Energy Blog

So, “pure” facts don’t tend to change our minds very often. And surprisingly, presenting facts alone when encouraging a new perspective can often result in the opposite effect on people who disagree....

Which naturally leads to our next question, “If cultural influence is so strong on perceiving facts, is trying to educate people of the beneficial facts about nuclear energy hopeless?”

We agree with Steve’s answer, “Not at all.”

But the key is to frame our factual and technically accurate answers within the cultural framework understanding of those we are trying to engage.

Reading these words made me believe that it is not at all unrealistic to anticipate that the practice of science will in the not too distant future be happily and productively integrated with the science of science communication.

Is evoking emotion a means of communicating "factual information" on risk and the like? The Wittlin test

I would say "yes, so long as..." and then launch into a long, abstract account of emotion as a form of cognitive perception that is uniquely suited to apprehending the significance of information for goods a person values (see Damasio, Descartes' Error; Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought) but that is also vulnerable to bias and hence manipulation, blah blah...

Maggie Wittlin, however, has sent me an email that convinces me there is a much simpler answer: unconditionally"yes" or unconditionally "no" depending on what the emotional appeal is about and what the cultural worldview is of the person answering the question! 

Two recent cases (one argued today) seem to be asking the question: are images that cause strong emotional reactions toward the subject matter informative?  Or are they mere advocacy?  I think you'll get two different answers based on (1) whether you ask and egalitarian or a hierarch (serious individualists might be consistent) and (2) which case you ask about:

On the right, we have the Texas sonogram case, where CJ Edith Jones writes, "Though there may be questions at the margins, surely a photograph and description of its features constitute the purest conceivable expression of 'factual information.' If the sonogram changes a woman’s mind about whether to have an abortion -- a possibility which Gonzales says may be the effect of permissible conveyance of knowledge, Gonzales, 550 U.S. at 160, 127 S. Ct. at 1634 -- that is a function of the combination of her new knowledge and her own 'ideology' ('values' is a better term), not of any 'ideology' inherent in the information she has learned about the fetus."

On the left, we have the challenge to the FDA cigarette warning label regulations, where "Stern also argued today that smokers do not fully understand tobacco’s harmful effect on health. The images, he argued, communicate the risk of smoking more effectively than do text warnings."  On the other hand, "Noel Francisco, representing R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. in the dispute, said the labels cross the line from fact-based to issue advocacy. The government is triggering a negative emotional reaction."

What does the Trayvon Martin case mean? What *should* it mean? part 2

In part 1, I argued that what the Trayvon Martin case means won’t turn on what the facts are found to be.

On the contrary, what we understand the facts to be will turn on what the case means to us as members of one or another cultural group.

Public reactions to the case display the characteristic signature of cultural cognition--the tendency of people to fit the perception of legally consequential facts to their group commitments.

The influence of cultural cognition explains why people with different outlooks and identities are forming such strong and divergent understandings of what happened despite their having almost no clear evidence to go on.

And it predicts (on the basis of experimental studies) that they are likely to continue to be divided just as bitterly no matter how much evidence comes to light—even if it turns out, say, that an unobserved neighbor made a digital recording of the attack with his or her cell phone (or high-resolution camera).

But as I said in my last post, this conclusion doesn’t mean there’s no point talking about the case. We should be addressing the meanings that divide us on an issue like this, because they divide us on lots of things—not just the use of violence by individuals of one race on those of another, or even the use of it by the police against private citizens, but also matters as diverse as whether climate change is occurring or whether schools should vaccinate pre-adolescent girls against HPV.

This sort of division, in my view, is a barrier to our coming to democratic consensus on a wide variety of policies that promote our common welfare in ways perfectly compatible with our diverse cultural values.

The question, in my view, is how we might use the Trayvon Martin case as an occasion for a meaningful discussion about meanings in our political life.

In this post, I’ll identify how not to do it.

2.  Replaying history: “shall issue,” “stand your ground,” and the culture of honor 

It turns out that we have been “discussing” cultural meanings since pretty much the start of this affair. But we’ve been doing it in the idiom of culturally motivated empirical assertions about the impact of law.

Two laws, in particular—one relating to guns and the other to the use of self-defense.

Florida is one of the 38 states with so-called “shall issue” laws, which essentially mandate that any adult citizen who has not been convicted of a felony or diagnosed with a mental illness be issued a permit to carry a concealed firearm in public.

It is also one of a dozen or states that has recently enacted “stand your ground” laws, which provide that a person “who is attacked in any  [public] place where he has a right to be has no duty to retreat” before resorting to deadly force to defend him- or herself from a potentially lethal assault. (Media reports miscalculate the number—apparently counting laws that existed before the recent spate of “stand your ground” enactments and also mixing in ones that relate to the use of deadly force in the home.)

George Zimmerman, the shooter in this case, was carrying a concealed handgun pursuant to a “shall issue” license. He also asserts that his fatal shooting of Martin—whom Zimmerman was tailing because he looked “suspicious”—was an act of self-defense.

Unsurprisingly, there has been a barrage of commentaries attributing violent assaults to “shall issue” and “stand your ground” laws, and a counter-barrage crediting these laws with reducing the incidence of violent crime.

These empirical arguments are specious. Indeed, they are part and parcel of a longstanding cultural division in our political life. Zealots who crave (or indeed profit from) such debate are exploiting the Trayvon Martin case to deepen that division—crowding out discussion of things that really matter.

a. The evidence. There is no persuasive empirical evidence that “shall issue” laws have any impact on the rate of violent crime.

Don’t take my word for it: that's the conclusion the National Academy of Sciences reached in an “expert consensus” report, which examined numerous empirical studies on the matter and concluded that it was simply impossible to say one way or another whether such laws increase crime or instead decrease it as a result of their effect in deterring violent predation.

The evidence on how “stand your ground” laws have affected violent-crime rates is no more conclusive. Indeed, it’s hard to conceive of how it could be.

These laws have all been enacted in the last decade. Yet the rule that a person can “stand his ground”—that he has no duty to retreat before using deadly force in self-defense—has been the majority rule among U.S. states for over a century. It was already the rule, in fact, in many of the states that have recently adopted “stand your ground” laws (e.g., Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah, Washington, and West Virginia).

Before it enacted its “stand your ground” law, Florida apparently did make the lawful use of deadly force in self-defense conditional on a duty to avail oneself of any safe route of retreat, at least when an individual was attacked outside his or her home. But violent crime has decreased in that state over the the last decade.

Indeed, violent crime has decreased throughout the U.S. during that time. Identifying all the potential causes for this trend, and disentangling them from one another in order to determine what impact (if any) enacting or not enacting a “stand your ground” law has had on the velocity of crime abatement in any particular state, would involve overcoming all the statistical difficulties that led the National Academy of Sciences to toss its hands up in the air when it tried to measure the impact of “shall issue” laws on violent crime.

Any commentator who asserts with confidence that either “stand your ground” laws or “shall issue” laws increase or decrease crime simply doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.

b. Culture, cognition, and political opportunism. What there is persuasive empirical evidence of, however, is the biasing impact of cultural cognition on individuals’ assessments of the impact of laws like these.

Individuals with egalitarian, communitarian values—for whom the gun is a noxious symbol of patriarchy, racism, indifference to others, and hostility to reason—predictably construe the evidence as showing that lax gun control laws increase deadly violence.

In contrast, those with hierarchical and individualistic worldviews—for whom the gun is associated with positive values such as courage, self-reliance, and honor—predictably fit their perceptions of the evidence to the culturally congenial conclusion that shall issue laws decrease homicide rates.

As a result of these same dynamics, moreover, they both tend to misperceive that the weight of expert evidence is on their side.

The same cultural divisions mark reactions to the duty to retreat in self-defense laws. Indeed, the advent of the “stand your ground” movement is intimately connected to cultural conflict over guns.

As indicated, the motivation for these statutes wasn’t to change the law. On the contrary, it was to provoke culturally grounded conflict.

The biggest threat to the gun industry is not that guns will be regulated out of existence. It is that future generations of Americans, as they become progressively more removed from the cultural norms that motivate people to buy guns, will simply lose interest in owning them.

Orchestrated by the NRA, the campaign to enact “stand your ground” laws is a booster shot for those norms. By design, “stand your ground” laws radiate individualistic and hierarchical values. The enactment of them—particularly over the predictable, and predictably strident, opposition of groups associated with egalitarian and communitarian values—broadcasts the vitality of a pro-gun ethos, a signal that can be expected to inculcate the same in those who receive that signal.

c. We’ve seen this before; enough already! The cultural battle over “stand your ground” laws is actually an historical replay.

Just over a century ago, courts in the South and West adopted the “no retreat” rule. They called the “true man” doctrine, a label that recognized that a man whose character is “true” (that is, in order, or straight, like a “true beam”) appropriately values his own liberty more than the life of someone who wrongfully threatens it.

Northeastern jurists and commentators denounced this departure from the traditional “retreat to the wall” position as an expression of the “feeling which is responsible for the duel, the war, for lynching.” The echo of the Civil War reverberated through this legal debate for a period for some three decades.

Then, in one of the most brilliant demonstrations of statesmanship in the history of America jurisprudence, Justice Holmes defused this controversy by draining it of its expressive significance.

It’s futile, he reasoned in the 1921 decision of Brown v. United States, for the law to demand that someone who faces a deadly threat “pause to consider whether a reasonable man might not think it possible to fly with safety.” “Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife."

Just like that, the “true man doctrine” became the “scared shitless man defense.” The South and the West got the rule they wanted, but only after it had been gutted of the meaning that galled the Northeast.

Everyone lost interest, and the issue went away. Gun control essentially took its place as the front of the battle over the status of honor norms in U.S. law and culture.

But then 85 years later the NRA came to the brilliant realization that it could subsidize the culture war over guns by reviving the “true man” doctrine in the form of the new, Clint-Eastwoodesque  “stand your ground” laws. 

Not surprisingly, the most receptive states were located in regions of the country that already had the “true man” doctrine.

But no matter: the point wasn’t to change the law; it was to agitate and inflame.

The NRA could count on agitation, of course, only if the egalitarian communitarian opponents of the honor culture—the descendents of the “true man” critics—took the bait. Which of course, they have done. They'd be out of work too without this sort of conflict.

Hey—I didn’t know him. But I think I can safely say, “You are no Justice Holmes,” to the legions of commentators now seizing on the Trayvon Martin as an occasion to raise the volume in equally tendentious and tedious “shall issue” and “stand your ground” debates.

I’d also like to tell them to just back off.  Not only are you needlessly sowing division; you are destroying the prospects for a meaningful conversation of the values that—despite our cultural differences—in fact unite us.

References

Dan M. Kahan, The Secret Ambition of Deterrence, 113 Harv. L. Rev. 413 (1999).

Dan M Kahan & Donald Braman, More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions, 151 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1291 (2003). 

Dan Kahan, Donald Braman, Geoffrey Cohen, John Gastil & Paul Slovic, Who Fears the HPV Vaccine, Who Doesn’t, and Why? An Experimental Study of the Mechanisms of Cultural Cognition, 34 Law Human Behav 501 (2010).

Dan M. Kahan, Donald Braman, John Gastil, Paul Slovic & C. K. Mertz, Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White-Male Effect in Risk Perception, 4 J. Empirical Legal Studies 465 (2007).

Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith & Donald Braman, Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus, 14 J. Risk Res. 147 (2011).

Dan M. Kahan, The Cognitively Illiberal State, 60 Stan. L. Rev. 115-54 (2007).

Update on Sunday, April 8, 2012 at 10:30PM by Dan Kahan

Fellow CCP member David Hoffman has posted a thoughtful response to parts 1 & 2 at concurringopinions.com. 

It ends up w/ 3 points:

1.  When Dan says that “we’ll never know what happened”, I bet he means to include a future where we find a videotape of the event. As the CCP project has found, video doesn’t reduce factual dissensus when the questions being asked are about motive or judgment.  Though a video of the shooting might tell us, for example, if Zimmerman approached Martin or visa versa, it almost certainly would leave enough in doubt to permit culturally motivated inferences.  That said, missing in Dan’s account is an explanation of why this particular case has caught the public’s eye when other asserted self-defense moments do not.  In part I think that it’s the mystery that is driving attention here. Conflicting accounts, new witnesses, allegations of a police cover-up: these are all ammunition for new media stories, which continue to keep the event fresh in the public’s mind.

2.  In that light, Dan’s admonition to “cool it” is welcome, but I wonder if it threatens to deprive critics of the police department’s handling of the case of an avenue of public awareness.  That is, it might be that informing (exciting) egalitarians about the stand-your-ground law is exactly how Martin’s allies managed to initially capture public attention – which was in turn necessary to encourage florida’s authorities to step in and perform a new investigation of the facts.  Without the law, this is merely a case about murky facts and police discretion.  With it, it’s a national story.

3.  Dan implicitly asserts that the stand your ground lawmaking was intended to provide a booster shot for gun owners.  This suggests a testable hypothesis.  As compared to states without such laws, but with similar pre-existing cultures of gun ownership, stand your ground states should be losing their firearm traditions more slowly.  Though testing expressive effects of laws is notoriously difficult, this seems like a nice experiment that an enterprising VAP might want to take on.

On 1: 

When I say "never know," I don't contemplate discovery of a video.  My point was that even if a video did magically appear, it would not settle things -- just as videos didn't resolve factual disputes (couldn't) in Rodney King, Scott v. Harris, all the the recent uses of force against occupy protesters, all the less recent cases (including ones in the S Ct) featuring abortion protesters, etc.

Without a video, things don't become clearer, of course. Remember that in the Goetz case there were multiple witnesses & even a video-taped confession by Goetz in which he stated that his goal was to "murder" the teens whom he shot. Still, to this day, when people read about and discuss the case, they form conflicting perceptions of "what happened."  And seems pretty clear we we'll have even less to go on in the Trayvon Martin case than that.

On 2:

I don't want to spoil the conclusion, but outrage at the (now removed) prosecutor's initial decision not to press charges or investigate further didn't require culturally motivated agitation. Disgust was bi-partisan, or "multi-cultural," at the outset. Now the cultural battle lines are drawn; everyone's got the memo: it's "us" vs. "them."

On 3:

Interesting, but I actually don't think a test of how the "stand your ground" laws have interacted with gun ownership & culture is the right test for what was intended. People often make their best guesses about the consequences of their action, and then are proven wrong by events. The best proof is just to talk to the people involved. I don't think the NRA has really even concealed its motivation for pushing the "stand your ground" laws.

Another cool book: van Rijswoud, Public faces of science

Found another really great book on-line:

Erwin van Rijswoud, Public faces of science: Experts and identity work in the boundary zone of science, policy and public debate (Radboud University Nijmegen, 2012).

It's actually van Rijswould's doctoral dissertation.

But anyway, the work examines Dutch scientists' impressions of how their work and expertise were received in various public policy debates, including ones on H1N1 vaccination, flood control, and HPV vaccination of adolescent girls.

The analyses are based on "biographical narrative." At the beginning of the work, he explains this method, which involves analytically motivated synthesis of interviews with the scientists, supplemented with other materials, and presented in a form that uses story-telling elements not typical at all for social science work (unlike typical ethnography, the voice is much more internal, almost "first person"). 

I was really interested in vR's discussion of HPV, an issue the CCP group has also studied. I hadn't realized that the issue was controversial in the Netherlands, too (likely I should be embarrassed to say that). I did know that England didn't have any trouble implementing a national immunization program, so there are definitely some great lessons to be learned through comparative study.

Also hadn't realized that there was political dispute over expert flood control advice in the Netherlands. Actually, efficient flood management in Holland & other regions of the country is often offered as an example of what the successful integration of science into policymaking is supposed to look like!

Thanks to van Rijswoud & Radboud University for making his work widely available & at no charge!

What does the Trayvon Martin case mean? What *should* it mean? part 1

If one were to judge from the media coverage—the dueling depictions of the characters of the shooter and his victim; the minute dissections of fragmentary witness statements; the “expert” voice-identification of screams picked up in the background of a 911 call; the high-resolution scrutiny of  low-resolution of video footage of the shooter in police custody that reveal the existence/absence of telltale wounds—one would think that the significance of the Trayvon Martin case turns (or ultimately will turn) decisively on the facts.

In actuality, the opposite is true: the significance we attach to the case will determine our perception of the facts; and because what it signifies turns on cultural meanings that divide our society, the members of different groups will form highly opposed understandings of what happened that terrible night.

Does that mean it’s pointless to be discussing the case?

On the contrary. In my view, the public agitation the case has provoked is evidence of how important it is for us to have a public conversation about the diversity of our cultural outlooks and their relation to law, and that this case is an ideal occasion for addressing that issue.

But if we insist that the discussion take the form of competing, culturally partial (and even culturally partisan) renditions of the facts, we are highly unlikely to engage the real issues in a universally meaningful way. And in that circumstance, we can be sure that the sources of agitation will persist.

I have more to say than it makes sense to put in one post.  So regard this as installment 1 of 3.

1. Meanings are cognitively prior to fact

The Trayvon Martin case, polls unsurprisingly reveal, divides people along cultural lines.

In this sense, it is very much like a host of other high-profile types of cases: public altercations leading to a mixed-race killing (think Bernard Goetz and Howard Beach); the slaying (or mutilation; think Lorena Bobbitt) of sleeping men by female partners who allege chronic abuse; the prosecutions (William Kennedy Smith)—or not (Duke lacrosse)—of men alleged to have disregarded women's verbal resistance to sexual intercourse; forceful arrests of political protestors (Occupy Wall Street; Operation Rescue) pepper sprayed by police—or of fleeing drivers whose bodies are broken by the impact of their crashing cars (Scott v. Harris) or the fusillade of baton blows of their pursuers (Rodney King).

CCP has conducted experimental studies of cases like these. What we have found, in all of these contexts, is that people unconsciously form perceptions of fact that reflect their stance on the cultural meanings the cases convey.

Those committed to norms of honor and self-reliance, on the one hand, and those who value equality and collective concern, on the other; those who believe women warrant esteem for mastery of traditionally female domestic roles and those who believe women as well as men should be conferred status for success in civil society; those who place a premium on respect for authority and those who apprehend the abuse of it as a paramount evil—all see different things in these types of cases, even when they are forming their perceptions on the basis of the same evidence.

Moreover, members of all these groups know that what one sees (or claims to see; each group always suspects the other of disingenuousness) depends on who one is culturally speaking.

As a result, in controversies over these sorts of cases, those on both sides come to view competing factual claims as markers of opposing allegiances.  The ultimate resolution of these facts in courts of law, in turn, becomes evidence of who counts and who doesn’t in an our society.

These are identity-threatening conditions. It is the extreme anxiety that they provoke that explains how despite knowing next to nothing about what actually happened—because we have nothing more to go on than factual snippets embroidered with righteous denunciation in the media, or antiseptic renditions of the “facts of the case” in appellate reporters—we nevertheless become filled with passionate certitude about the events. The discovery that others disagree with us fills us with incredulity and rage.

And most extraordinary of all, this same environment of symbolic status competition explains why such disagreement persists in the face of the most compelling forms of evidence of all. Even when we literally see the events with our own eyes—as we do when they are recorded on video, e.g.—cultural cognition assures that we will disagree about we are seeing. 

We will disagree, in such instances, with those who hold values different from ours when we watch what we understand to be the same event.

Moreover, we will disagree with those who share our values if, as a result of a hidden experimental manipulation, we start with different impressions of the sort of event (abortion-clinic protest, or anti-war protest) we are watching.

Barely detectable above the cacophony in the Trayvon Martin case are a few lonely voices cautioning us not to jump to conclusions. We don’t really know enough about what happened, they rightly point out, to form such strong opinions.

But the truth is, we’ll never know what happened, because we—the members of our culturally pluralistic society—have radically different understandings of what a case like this means.

The questions are whether it makes sense to talk about that, and if so, what should we be saying?

References

Dan M. Kahan & Donald Braman, The Self-defensive Cognition of Self-defense, 45 Am Crim Law Rev 1 (2008).

Dan M. Kahan, The Supreme Court 2010 Term—Foreword: Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law 126 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (2011). 

Dan M. Kahan, Culture, Cognition, and Consent: Who Perceives What, and Why, in 'Acquaintance Rape' Cases, 158 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 729 (2010).

Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman & Donald Braman, Whose Eyes Are You Going to Believe? Scott v. Harris and the Perils of Cognitive Illiberalism, 122 Harv. L. Rev. 837 (2009).

Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman, Donald Braman, Danieli Evans & Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, They Saw a Protest: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction, 64 Stan. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2012).

Mark Kelman, Reasonable Evidence of Reasonableness, 17 Critical Inquiry 798-817 (1991). 

Cultural theory of risk: it's not just about clean air & water

It's remarkable and heartening to see how widespread the influence of the cultural theory of risk has become. 

Here are three recent examples of articles that assess the importance of the cutural predispositions for risk and science communication, none of which is about traditional environmental concerns:

1. Griffiths, M. & Brooks, D.J. Informing Security Through Cultural Cognition: The Influence of Cultural Bias on Operational Security. Journal of Applied Security Research 7, 218-238 (2012).
   
   Cultural bias will influence risk perceptions and may breed “security complacency,” resulting in the decay of risk mitigation efficacy. Cultural Cognition theory provides a methodology to define how people perceive risks in a grid/group typology. In this study, the cultural perceptions of Healthcare professionals to access control measures were investigated. Collected data were analyzed for significant differences and presented on spatial maps. The results demonstrated correlation between cultural worldviews and perceptions of security risks, indicating that respondents had selected their risk perceptions according to their cultural adherence. Such understanding leads to improved risk management and reduced decay of mitigation strategies.
   
    
2. Daniel J. Decker, W.F.S., Darrick T. N. Evensen, Richard C. Stedman, Katherine A. McComas,Margaret  A. Wild, Kevin T. Castle, and Kirsten M. Leong. Public perceptions of wildlife-associated disease: risk  communication matters. Human Wildlife Interactions 6, 112–122 (2012).
   
   Wildlife professionals working at the interface where conflicts arise between people and wild animals have an exceptional responsibility in the long-term interest of sustaining society’s support for wildlife and its conservation by resolving human–wildlife conflicts so that people continue to view wildlife as a valued resource. The challenge of understanding and responding to people’s concerns about wildlife is particularly acute in situations involving wildlife-associated disease and may be addressed through One Health communication. Two important questions arise in this work: (1) how will people react to the message that human health and wildlife health are linked?; and (2) will wildlife-associated disease foster negative attitudes about wildlife as reservoirs, vectors, or carriers of disease harmful to humans? The answers to these questions will depend in part on whether wildlife professionals successfully manage wildlife disease and communicate the associated risks in a way that promotes societal advocacy for healthy wildlife rather than calls for eliminating wildlife because they are viewed as disease-carrying pests. This work requires great care in both formal and informal communication. We focus on risk perception, and we briefly discuss guidance available for risk communication, including formation of key messages and the importance of word choices.
   
    
3. Kaklauskas, A., et al. Passive house model for quantitative and qualitative analyses and its intelligent system. Energy and Buildings (in press), on-line publication available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2012.03.008.
   
   The passive house, along with models of its composite parts, has been developed globally. Simulation tools analyze its energy use, comfort, micro-climate, quality of life and aesthetics as well as its technical, economic, legal/regulatory, educational and innovative aspects. Meanwhile the social, cultural, ethical, psychological, emotional, religious and ethnic aspects operating over the course of the existence of a passive house are given minimal attention or are ignored entirely. However, all the aspects mentioned must be analyzed in an integrated manner during the time a passive house is in existence. The authors of this article implemented this goal while they participated in two Intelligent Energy Europe programs, the Northpass and the DES-EDU projects. The Passive house model for quantitative and qualitative analyses and its intelligent system was developed during the time of these projects. The model and intelligent system are briefly described in this article, which ends with a case study.