Research Focus
Dan Kahan's research sits at the intersection of law, cognitive psychology, and political science. His central contribution is the development and empirical validation of Cultural Cognition Theory — the finding that individuals perceive risks and evaluate empirical evidence in ways that reflect their shared cultural values, rather than primarily in response to factual information.
His most influential finding, published in Nature Climate Change in 2012, demonstrated that higher science literacy and numeracy are associated with greater polarization on climate change risks — not less. This result fundamentally challenged the dominant deficit model of science communication, which assumes that public disagreement about science stems from factual ignorance.
More recently, Kahan's work on Science Curiosity has identified a more optimistic pathway: the disposition to seek out surprising or counterintuitive scientific information moderates identity-protective cognition and predicts engagement with accurate climate science across political and cultural groups.
Academic Background
Dan Kahan received his B.A. from Middlebury College and his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, he joined the Yale Law School faculty, where he has taught since 1994.
At Yale Law School, Kahan teaches courses on criminal law, evidence, and the law and science of risk perception. He is a member of the Cultural Cognition Project, which he founded in the late 1990s, and has held visiting appointments at institutions including Harvard Law School.
Selected Publications
