What are fearless white hierarchical individualist males afraid of? Lots of stuff! - Cultural Cognition of Health

I haven’t posted any data recently. And I haven’t explored/exploded the “white male effect” (WME) in risk perception in a while either.  So lets pack some new data around WME & blow her to smithereens!

Actually, the “white male effect” is one of the most important phenomena — one of the coolest findings ever — in the study of public risk perceptions.

WME refers to the tendency of white males to express less concern with (seemingly) all manner of risk than do minorities and women. The finding was first observed by Flynn, Slovic & Mertz (1994) and thereafter systematically charted by Finucane, Slovic, Mertz, Flynn, & Satterfield (2000).

Lots of scholars have looked at it since, trying to figure out what explains it.  Does it reflect some sort of “hard wired” or “genetic” disposition on the part of women to be more concerned about the welfare of others (obvious question: if so, why are minority males more concerned?) Are men evolutionarily programmed to be more “risk seeking” (same obvious question.) Are white males less concerned because they are politically less vulnerable themselves than minorities and women? Or maybe white males are just “getting it right” — because they are more educated, less vulnerable to cognitive biases?

None of the above is probably the best answer.

What makes those explanations weak is that there really isn’t a “white male effect.”  Rather there’s a white male hierarch individualist effect .

In a study in which I collaborated with Slovic, Braman, Gastil & Mertz (2007), we used the cultural cognition worldview scales as a magnifier to inspect more closely cultural influences observed in Finucane et al. (2000).

What we found, in effect, was that white hierarchical and individualistic males are so extremely skeptical of risks involving, say, the environment or (another thing we looked at) guns that they create the appearance of a  sample-wide “white male” effect.  That effect “disappears” once the extreme skepticism of these individuals (less than 1/6 of the population) is taken into account.  There isn’t any WME among individuals who are egalitarian and communitarian, hierarchical communitarian or (in the case of environmental risks) egalitarian and individualistic in their outlooks.

This finding fit the hypothesis that “identity protective cognition” was driving WME.  Identity protective cognition is a form of motivated reasoning .  It describes the tendency of people to fit their perceptions of risk (and related facts) to ones that reflect and reinforce their connection to important affinity groups, membership in which confers psychic, emotional, and material benefits.  The study of cultural cognition reflects the premise that the latent group affinities measured with the “cultural worldview scales” we employ in our studies are the ones motivating risk perceptions in conflicts that polarize the U.S. public.

The sorts of things white hierarchical individualistic males are “unafraid of” are activities essential to the the cultural roles they tend to occupy.  Among people who subscribe to that outlook, men attain status by occupying positions of authority in commerce and industry.  Gun possession plays an important role for men in such groups too–enabling hierarchical roles like father, protector, and provider and symbolizing individualistic (male) virtues like honor and courage and self-reliance.

Because the assertion that such activities are “dangerous” would justify restriction of them by the state — and invite resentment and stigmatization of those individuals conspicuously identified with them — hierarchical and individualistic white males have an especially powerful psychological incentive to resist such claims.

That was our conjecture– one founded generally on Mary Douglas’s and Aaron Wildavksy’s “cultural theory of risk” — and the evidence was more consistent with that than with other explanations, we suggested.  Other researchers have corroborated this hypothesis with related but distinct methods (that’s a good thing; being able to verify a hypothesis with multiple methods furnishes assurance that the effect is really “there” and not an artifact of a particular way of trying to test for it).

But here’s another thing– or some more evidence, really.  If identity-protective cognition is at work, there’s no reason to believe that white hierarchical individualist males will be uniformly more “risk dismissive” than other people.

They’ll be that way only with regard to private activities the regulation which poses a threat to activities essential to their cultural status.  Where regulation itself poses such a threat, they should worry about the risks that such regulation poses.  Moreover, if we can find private activities that threaten their cultural identities, their stake in securing regulation of them should motivate them to be risk sensitive in regard to those activities!

And we see exactly that! I’ll show you in brand new data, collected in April and May of this year.

But first let’s use these fresh data (mmmm mmmm–don’t you love the aroma of freshly regressed data?!) to observe the “classic” white male effect.

This figure illustrates the “effect” with regard to climate change:

Using the “ industrial strength risk perception measure ,” we can see that white males are a lot less worried about climate change than “everyone else.”

This graphic, which uses a Monte Carlo simulation to illustrate the results of a multivariate regression analysis , shows that the “white male effect” is being driven by the extreme climate change skepticism of of white hierarchical individualistic males (who are, again, about 1/6 of the population).  There’s no meaningful gender or race variance in the rest of the subjects in this nationally representative sample.

Now consider a larger collection of risks: