An interdisciplinary research initiative studying how shared cultural values shape individual and collective risk perceptions — and what this means for science communication and democratic governance.
The Cultural Cognition Project (CCP) is an interdisciplinary research initiative based at Yale Law School. Our mission is to understand how cultural values shape the way individuals perceive risks and evaluate policy-relevant empirical evidence — and to use this understanding to develop science communication strategies that work across cultural divides.
We believe that public disagreements about empirical questions like climate change, vaccine safety, and gun control are not primarily a product of factual ignorance. Our research consistently shows that these disagreements reflect identity-protective cognition: the tendency to evaluate evidence in ways that protect one's cultural identity rather than to reach accurate conclusions.
The CCP's research spans law, psychology, political science, and communication studies. Our core areas include risk perception measurement, science literacy and numeracy, motivated reasoning, science curiosity, and the political economy of scientific consensus communication.
Among our most cited findings: higher science literacy and numeracy are associated with greater polarization on culturally contested risks — not less. This counterintuitive result, published in Nature Climate Change in 2012, overturned the dominant assumption in science communication policy that public conflict over science stems from ignorance.
Our more recent work on Science Curiosity offers a more optimistic finding: individuals high in science curiosity — a disposition to seek out surprising or counterintuitive information — show reduced identity-protective cognition on politically contested science topics, regardless of their political orientation.
The Cultural Cognition Project has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, and Yale Law School. Our research collaborators have included scholars at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School, and institutions in Europe and Australia.
CCP research has been cited in U.S. federal regulatory proceedings, congressional testimony, and public health policy debates. Our work has been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Nature, and Science, among many other outlets. Dan Kahan's blog has reached a global audience of researchers, policymakers, science communicators, and engaged citizens.