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.
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.
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.
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.
criminal law
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).
criminal law 
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.
hpv, reproductive health 
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.
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.
environment, law, risk regulation 
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.
law, police, scott v. harris, video
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.
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.
emotion
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.
Cultural Theory
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)
environment, guns, law, public health
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.
criminal law, mental health
Many recent studies suggest that "ideology" predicts judicial decisionmaking. But the evidence is as consistent with cultural cognition.
judicial cognition, law 
How will Americans react as they learn more about this novel science? Will popular attitudes be guided by the best available scientific evidence? Or will other influences affect public perceptions of nanotechnology risks This paper reports the result of an experimental investigation of these questions.
How individuals process information on nanotechnology risks is critically dependent on the perceived cultural values of the information source. The impact of this "cultural credibility heuristic," experimental data show, can either accentuate or mitigate cultural polarization with respect to nanotechnology risk perceptions.
A CCP study finds that this novel technology generates a novel risk-perception profile.
A national study conducted by CCP researchers finds that synthetic biology risk perceptions have a distinctive profile, one that turns cultural, political, and religious commitments nearly upside down.
How do legal actors know what the relevant facts and law are in any given case? The answer, we argue, is that they know in the same way that ordinary citizens know. When deliberating about what dangers are real and which are specious, and about which policies are efficacious and which are futile or even self-defeating, ordinary folk will rarely have direct access to the answers themselves. Instead, they must make decisions about what information and which sources warrant their trust. They must judge whether the stories in which the information is embedded are plausible and consistent with one another. They must consider which norms are relevant, given the facts as they know them. And all the empirical evidence we have suggests they will do all of this through interlocking social and cognitive mechanisms that cause them to rely on a culturally contingent situation sense, an implicit knowledge of how the material and social world works and who can be trusted to report it accurately.