Geoengineering and the Science Communication Environment: A Cross-Cultural Experiment

We conducted a two-nation study (United States, n = 1500; England, n = 1500) to test a novel theory of science communication. The cultural cognition thesis posits that individuals make extensive reliance on cultural meanings in forming perceptions of risk. The logic of the cultural cognition thesis suggests the potential value of a distinctive two-channel science communication strategy that combines information content (“Channel 1”) with cultural meanings (“Channel 2”) selected to promote open-minded assessment of information across diverse communities. In the study, scientific information content on climate change was held constant while the cultural meaning of that information was experimentally manipulated. Consistent with the study hypotheses, we found that making citizens aware of the potential contribution of geoengineering as a supplement to restriction of CO₂ emissions helps to offset cultural polarization over the validity of climate-change science. We also tested the hypothesis, derived from competing models of science communication, that exposure to information on geoengineering would provoke discounting of climate-change risks generally. Contrary to this hypothesis, we found that subjects exposed to information about geoengineering were slightly more concerned about climate change risks than those assigned to a control condition.

Judicial Backlash or Just Backlash? Evidence from a National Experiment

The question about whether there is a distinctive public reaction when the Supreme Court decides constitutional issues — the question of judicial backlash — permeates our discussions of constitutional law, yet we have little to no empirical research about how people think about this issue. To answer this question, we conducted an experiment before the midterm congressional elections in the fall of 2010. We hypothesized that people respond to an institution based on whether the institution is seen as supporting or threatening their cultural worldview. Half of study subjects were assigned to a condition in which a constitutional right to gay marriage was protected and the other half were assigned to a condition in which a constitutional right to carry a concealed weapon was protected (with half of each of these subject populations being told the Court decided the issue and half being told that Congress did). Our results support the hypothesis that the cultural valence of the decision by the Court or Congress triggered the institutional choice of subjects. The Court does polarize underlying opinions on the constitutional issue and voting preferences more than Congress does. Our results suggest complications for efforts to decide constitutional issues in a manner appealing to all Americans. Our results also suggest that the Court and Congress might be able aggressively to decide constitutional issues because the public has no fixed sense of their respective institutional roles. We conclude by discussing what our results mean for interested communities outside of government, including social movements and constitutional theorists.

The Supreme Court 2010 Term—Foreword: Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law

Why is the “neutrality” of Supreme Court decisionmaking a matter of persistent political disagreement? What should be done to mitigate such conflict? Once the predominant focus of constitutional law scholarship, efforts to answer these questions are now widely viewed as evincing misunderstandings of what can be coherently demanded of theory and realistically expected of judges. This paper, published in the Harvard Law Review's annual Supreme Court issue, attributes the Court’s “neutrality crisis” to a very different form of misunderstanding. The study of motivated reasoning (in particular cultural cognition) shows that individuals are predisposed to fit their perceptions of policy-relevant facts to their group commitments. In the course of public deliberations, these facts become suffused with antagonistic meanings that transform utilitarian policymaking into occasions for symbolic status competition. These same dynamics, the paper argues, make constitutional decisionmaking the focus of status competition among groups whose members are unconsciously motivated to fit perceptions of the Court’s decisions to their values. Theories of constitutional neutrality do not address the distinctive cognitive groundings of this form of illiberal conflict; indeed, they make it worse by promoting idioms of justification, in Court opinions and public discourse generally, that reinforce the predisposition of diverse groups to attribute culturally partisan aims to those who disagree with them. The divisive effects of motivated reasoning on policy deliberations can be offset by science communication techniques that avoid selectively threatening any group’s cultural worldview. Similarly, public confidence in the Supreme Court’s neutrality can be restored by the Court’s communication of meanings that uniformly affirm the values of culturally diverse citizens.

The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change

The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: the individual level, which is characterized by citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk perceptions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.

The Results of Deliberation

Social scientists have used mock juror studies to produce a vast body of literature showing how different variables influence juror decision-making. This paper presents a computer model that extrapolates findings about jurors to juries, showing how variables of interest affect the decisions not only of individuals but also of deliberative bodies. The computer model simulates jurors from a specified community, imputes initial votes to them conditional on a user-specified model, and uses Robert MacCoun’s new “social burden of proof” framework to predict the likelihood that the jury will come out for either side, given those initial votes. The paper then demonstrates the usefulness of the model by applying it to the Cultural Cognition Project’s study of the factors that influence the verdict in acquaintance rape cases. The value of the model for prosecutors, policy-makers, and legal scholars is discussed.

"They Saw a Protest": Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction

The Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence draws a sharp distinction between political persuasion, which the state cannot constitutionally prohibit, and physical intimidation, which it can. But is it psychologically realistic to expect decisionmakers to reliably make the distinction? A CCP experiment found that whether study subjects perceived a videotaped protest to be a peaceful rally or an incipient riot depended on the relationship between the subjects’ worldviews and what subjects believed the protest to be about (either the provision of abortion or the exclusion of gays and lesbians from the military).

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Some Realism about Punishment Naturalism

Where do our intuitions about wrongdoing come from? In this paper, we critique punishment naturalism -- the notion that such intuitions are independent of culture. By way of contrast we describe an alternative approach, punishment realism, that develops the core insights of legal realism via psychology and anthropology. Punishment realism, we argue, offers a more complete account of agreement and disagreement over the criminal law and provides a more detailed and credible account of the social and cognitive mechanisms that move people to either agree or disagree with one another on whether and how much praise or punishment a given act deserves. The differences between these two empirical accounts also entail contrasting implications for how those interested in maximizing social welfare and public satisfaction with the law should approach questions of crime and punishment.

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Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus

Why doesn't "scientific consensus" settle disputes about climate change and other issues? The answer, a CCP experimental study suggests, is not that only some citizens view scientific opinion as important, but rather that citizens of diverse cultural outlooks form different perceptions of what most scientists believe.

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Fixing the Communications Failure

There is a culture war in America over science. Why? And what should be done to promote the ability of culturally diverse citizens to agree on how science can inform their common interests in health, security, and prosperity? This article, published in Nature, uses the findings of Cultural Cognition Project studies to address these questions.

Nanotechnology and society: The evolution of risk perceptions

What do we now know about public perceptions of the risks of nanotechnology? What do we have good reason to expect about how those perceptions will evolve? A brief commentary, published in Nature Nanotechnology, addresses these questions. The commentary also identifies appropriate steps to extend investigation of nanotechnology risk perceptions and discusses the contribution this form of study makes to understanding of public risk perceptions and communication generally. 

Culture, Cognition, and Consent: Who Perceives What, and Why, in "Acquaintance Rape" Cases

How the law defines rape, a CCP study finds, matters much less than decisionmakers' cultural predispositions, which shape their perceptions of consent and other facts in "date rape" cases (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Law Review).

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Who Fears the HPV Vaccine, Who Doesn't, and Why? An Experimental Study

Is the controversy over the mandatory vaccination of school girls for HPV a cultural one? Yes, because what and whom individuals believe about the risks and benefits of the vaccine, experimental data show, are shaped by their cultural commitments.

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First Report on Gay and Lesbian Parenting

This report on stage one of a three-stage study details who holds which factual beliefs about gay and lesbian parenting.  Project members are using the information in this study to help us develop hypotheses and strategies for stages two and three.  

Cultural Cognition and Public Policy

How does cultural conflict influence public policymaking? Surprisingly, not by generating moral disputes over the ends to be pursued by law but rather by generating empirical disagreements over the consequences of economic, crime-control, national security, and other policies designed to promote our common interests.

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Whose Eyes Are You Going to Believe? An Empirical Examination of Scott v. Harris

Based on a video shot from inside a police cruiser, the U.S. Supreme court concluded "no reasonable juror" could find that the risk posed by a fleeing motorist did not warrant deadly force (the deliberate ramming of his car) to stop him. But a study by the Cultural Cognition Project (published in the Harvard Law Review) finds that perceptions of risk among persons who viewed the tape were highly conditional on those persons' cultural worldviews.

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Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect

The "white male effect" refers to the until-now unexplained tendency of white males to fear all manner of risk less than women and minorities. Published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, this paper reports the results of an empirical study finding that that "the white male effect" derives from the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions protective of identities they enjoy by virtue of cultural norms that feature race- and gender-differentiation in roles relating to putatively dangerous activities.

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Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation

Do emotions interfere with the rational evaluation of risk? Or is the rational evaluation of risk impossible without the aid of emotion? Drawing on data collected by the Cultural Cognition Project, this paper (published in the University of Pennslyvania Law Review ) suggests a revisionist interpretation of recent studies on the centrality of emotion to risk perception.

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Cultural Cognition as a Conception of the Cultural Theory of Risk

The cultural cognition of risk grows out of the "cultural theory of risk" associated with Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildvasky. This paper identifies the conceptual, methodological, and practical features of cultural cognition that distinguish it from other approaches for testing Douglas and Wildavsky's influential claims about risk perception.

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The Cognitively Illiberal State

Liberalism obliges the state to refrain from endorsement of a cultural orthodoxy and instead to base law on secular interests like harm prevention. But is this possible if lawmakers' perceptions of harm derive from their cultural values? (published in the Stanford Law Review)

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Cultural Cognition and Public Policy: The Case of Outpatient Commitment Laws

Oupatient commitment laws (OCLs) are highly controversial provisions that permit courts to order persons who are mentally ill to comply with specified outpatient-treatment regimens or face involuntary confinement. A CCP study, forthcoming in Law and Human Behavior , found that political conflict over OCLs reflects the influence of cultural values on citizens' perceptions of the impact of these laws on public health and safety.

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