Who fears what & why? Trust but verify! - Cultural Cognition of Health

Probably Patrick & a friend were involved in a discussion about whether those who are (aren’t) concerned about climate change are the “same” people who are (aren’t) concerned about nuclear power and GM food risks.

A discussion/argument like that is pretty interesting, if you think about it.

We all know that risk perceptions tend to come in intriguing packages — intriguing b/c the correlations between the factual understandings they comprise are more plausibly explained by the common cultural meanings they express than by any empirical premises they share.

E.g., imagine you were to say to me, “Gee, I wonder whether crime rates can be expected to up or instead to go down if one of the 40 or so states that now automatically issue a permit to carry a concealed handgun to any adult w/o a criminal record or a history of mental illness enacted a ban on venturing out of the house with a loaded pistol tucked unobtrusively in one’s coat pocket?”

If I answered, “Well, I’m not sure, but I do have some valid evidence that human activity has caused the temperature of the earth to increase in recent decades–surely you can deduce the answer from that,” you’d think either I was being facetious or I was an idiot (maybe both; they can occur together–I don’t know whether they are correlated).

But if I were to run up to you all excited & say, “hey, look–I found a correlation between believing that the temperature of the earth has not increased as a result of human causes in recent decades and believing that banning concealed handguns would cause crime to increase ,” you’d probably say, “So? Only a truly clueless dolt wouldn’t have expected that.”

You’d say that — & be right, as the inset graphic, which correlates responses to the “ industrial strength risk perception measure ” as applied to “private ownership of guns” and “global warming,” illustrates — b/c “everyone knows” (they can just see ) that our society is densely populated with “types of people” who form packages of related empirical beliefs in which the reality & consequences of human-caused climate change are inversely correlated with beliefs about the dangers posed by private ownership of handguns in the U.S.

The “types” are ones who share certain kinds of commitments relating to how society and other types of collective enterprises should be organized.  We can all see our social world is like that but because we can’t directly observe people’s “types” (they & the dispositions they impart are “latent variables”), we come up with observable indicators, like cultural worldviews” &/or “political ideologies” & various demographic characteristics, that we can combine into valid scales or classifying instruments of one sort or another . We can use those to satisfy our curiosity about the nature of the types & the dynamics that generate the puzzling pattern of empirical beliefs that they form on certain types of disputed risk issues.

We can all readily think of indicators of the sorts of “types” whose perceptions of the risks of climate change & guns are likely to be highly convergent, e.g.

Those risks are “politicized” in right-left terms, so we could use “right-left” political outlooks to specify the “types” & do a pretty decent job (a walk or bunt single; hey, it’s spring training!).

We could do even better (stand-up double) if we used the cultural cognition “worldview” scales — & if we tossed in race & gender as additional indicators (say, by including appropriate cross-product interaction variables in a regression model), we’d be hitting a homerun !

But here’s another interesting thing that Patrick’s query—and the argument I’m guessing was the motivation for his posing it: our perceptions of the packages and the types aren’t always shared, or even when widely held, aren’t always right.

Not that surprising, actually, when you remember that the types can’t be directly observed. It helps too to realize that the source of our apprehension of these matters—the packages, the types—is based on a form of sampling rife with potential biases.  The “data,” as it were, that inform our perceptions are always skewed by the partiality of our social interactions, which reflect our propensity to engage with those who share our outlooks and interests.

That sort of “selection bias” is a perfectly normal thing; only a lunatic would try to “stratify” his her social interaction to assure “representativeness” in his or her personal observations of how risk perceptions are distributed across types of persons (I suppose one could try applying population weights to all of one’s interactions, although that would be time consuming & a nuisance).

But it does mean that we’ll inevitably disagree with our associates now & again—and even when we don’t disagree, all be wrong —about who fears what & why.

E.g., many people think that concern over childhood immunizations is part of one or another risk-perception package held by one or another recognizable “type” of person.

Some picture them as  part of the package characteristic of the global-warming concerned, nuclear-power fearing tribe of “egalitarians, [who] oppose . . . big corporations and their products.”

When others grope at this particular elephant, they report feeling the “the conservative don’t-tread-on-me crowd that distrusts all government recommendations”—i.e., the same “type” that is skeptical of climate-change and nuclear-power risks.

Well, one or the other could have been right, but it turns out that they are both just plain wrong.

As the CCP report on Vaccine Risk Perceptions and Ad Hoc Risk Communication documents, all the recognizable “types”—whether defined in political or cultural terms—support universal childhood immunization.