Scientists discover source of public controversy on GM food risks: bitter cultural division between scaredy cats and everyone else! - Cultural Cognition of Health

Okay. Time for a “no, GM food risks are not politically polarizing—or indeed a source of any meaningful division among members of the public” booster shot.

Yes, it has been administered 5000 times already , but apparently, it has to be administered about once every 90 days to be effective.

Actually, I’ve monkeyed a bit with the formula of the shot to try to make it more powerful (hopefully it won’t induce autism or microcephaly but in the interest of risk-perception science we must take some risks).

We are all familiar (right? please say “yes” . . .) with this:

It’s just plain indisputable that GM food risks do not divide members of the U.S. general public along political linies. If you can’t see the difference between these two graphs, get your eyes or your ability to accept evidence medically evaluated.

But that’s the old version of the booster shot!

The new & improved one uses what I’m calling the “scaredy-cat risk disposition” ™ scale!

That scale combines Industrial Strength Risk Perception Measure (ISRPM) 0-7 responses to an eclectic — or in technical terms “random ass” — set of putative risk sources. Namely:

MASSHOOT. Mass shootings in public places

CARJACK. Armed carjacking (theft of occupied vehicle by person brandishing weapon)

ACCIDENTS. Accidents occurring in the workplace

AIRTRAVEL. Flying on a commercial airliner

ELEVATOR. Elevator crashes in high-rise buildings

KIDPOOL. Accidental drowning of children in swimming pools

Together, these risk perceptions form a reliable, one-dimensional scale (α = 0.80) that is distinct from fear of environmental risks or of deviancy risks (marijuana legalization, prostitution legalization, pornography distribution, and sex ed in schools).

Scaredy-cat is normally distributed, interestingly.  But unsurprisingly, it isn’t meaningfully correlated with right-left political predispositions.

So what is the relationship between scaredy-cat risk dispositions & GM food risk perceptions? Well, here you go:

Got it?  Political outlooks, as we know, don’t explain GM food risks, but variance in the sort of random-ass risk concerns measured by the Scaredy-cat scale do, at least to a modest extent.

We all are famaliar with this fundamental “us vs. them” division in American life.

On the one hand, we have those people who who walk around filled with terror of falling down elevator shafts, having their vehicles carjacked, getting their arms severed by a workplace “lathe,” and having their kids fall into a neighbor’s uncovered swimming pool and drowning.  Oh—and being killed by a crashing airplane either b/c they are a passenger on it or b/c they are  the unlucky s.o.b. who gets nailed by a piece of broken-off wing when it  comes hurtling to the ground.