"There is a culture war in America, but it is about
facts, not values," declare the researchers
at the Yale
Cultural Cognition Project in a new
study called "The Second National Risk and Culture
Study: Making Sense of-and Making Progress In-the American
Culture War of Fact" (full study not yet available online).
Contrary to the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's
famous
maxim, the study finds that most Americans believe
they're more than entitled to their own opinions; they
believe that they are entitled to their own facts. Obviously,
this complicates public policy debates.
The chief aim of the Yale Cultural Cognition Project
is to show how cultural values shape the public's risk
perceptions and related policy beliefs. Project scholars
define "cultural cognition" as "the tendency of individuals
to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact
to values that define their cultural identities." Their
research found that cultural identity values "exert
substantially more influence over risk perceptions than
does any other individual characteristic, including
gender, race, socioeconomic status, education, political
ideology and party affiliation."
This is intuitive to most of us. Ask nearly any American
a couple of questions about what they think of a list
of policy issues: the death penalty, abortion, gay rights,
the minimum wage, school choice, nuclear power, public
health, gun control, climate change, the propriety of
Christmas crèches in town squares, and affirmative action.
You will quickly get a pretty good idea of what they
think about all of the issues on the list. But why do
the ways people think about policy issues tend to cluster
together? The answer turns on how people feel about
societal risks and the policies aimed at reducing those
risks. And how people feel about risk is shaped by their
core values.
The Project usefully classifies cultural values on
two cross-cutting axes: hierarchy-egalitarianism and
individualism-communitarianism. Hierarchs think that
rights, duties, goods and offices should be differentially
distributed on the basis of clearly defined and stable
social characteristics (e.g., gender, wealth, ethnicity).
Egalitarians believe that rights, duties, goods and
offices should be distributed equally without regard
to such characteristics. Individualists think that people
should secure the conditions of their own flourishing
without collective interference or assistance. Communitarians
believe that societal interests trump individual ones
and that society should be responsible for securing
the conditions for individual flourishing.
To see how these cultural values affect people's
policy views, the Project has conducted a number of
opinion surveys on various issues. A 2004 survey found
that egalitarians and communitarians worry about environmental
risks and favor regulating commercial activities to
abate those risks. Individualists were skeptical of
environmental risks because they cherish markets and
private orderings which regulation threatens. And hierarchs
worried about the risks of illicit drug use and promiscuous
sex because they challenge traditional social norms
and roles. So far, so good. The research basically replicated
what most of us already intuit about how cultural values
affect (distort) policy judgments.
In the new study, the Project researchers conducted
one survey of 1700 subjects about their attitudes about
the risks of climate change. As the researchers expected
the egalitarians and communitarians were worried about
global warming and the hierarchs and individualists
were skeptical. In one part of the survey some subjects
read one of two newspaper stories about a study by a
group of climate change experts. The stories were identical
with regard to the facts about global warming, e.g.,
the earth's temperature is increasing, humans are causing
it, and that it would likely cause dire environmental
and economic damage if unabated. The only difference
was the policy solution. In one story the experts called
for "increased anti-pollution regulation" and in the
other they recommended the "revitalization of the nuclear
power industry."
The subjects who read the nuclear power version were
less culturally polarized than the ones who read the
anti-pollution version. Why? Because the individualists
and the hierarchs who read the nuclear version were
less inclined to dismiss the facts about global warming
than the individualists and hierarchs who read the anti-pollution
version were, even though the factual information and
the source were identical in both stories. Interestingly,
the individualists and hierarchs who read the anti-pollution
version were more skeptical of global warming than those
in a control group that did not read either version
of the newspaper story. This suggests that a real-world
consequence might be that media reporting on scientific
evidence coupled with calls for interventionist policies
such as the Kyoto Protocol hardens individualist and
hierarchal skepticism on global warming.
The Project researchers see this response of the
individualists and hierarchs to the newspaper stories
as an example of "identity protective" cognition in
which people subconsciously resist factual information
that threatens their defining values. The nuclear power
version tended to affirm the individualist and hierarchal
value commitments to technological progress, thus mitigating
their skepticism of the dangers posed by global warming.
"When policies are framed in ways that affirm rather
than threaten citizens' cultural beliefs, people are
less likely to dismiss information that runs contrary
to their prior beliefs," notes the study.
The new study also reports the results of the Project's
first survey in 2004. That survey focused on how cultural
values shaped how people feel about the risks of new
technologies about which they know little, in this case,
nanotechnology. Some 80 percent of the subjects surveyed
had previously not heard much about nanotechnology.
As part of the survey, a subset of 300 subjects was
given identical factual statements about the risks and
benefits of nanotechnology.
Unfortunately, more factual information about nanotechnology
led to more polarization on its risks and benefits.
The study found that after reading the factual information
that "egalitarians and communitarians were significantly
more concerned with risks of nanotechnology relative
to its benefits than were hierarchs and individualists."
Why? Because of "biased assimilation." This is the predisposition
of people to selectively notice and credit information
that affirms their values. "When this dynamic is at
work, individuals of diverse values don't converge but
instead polarize when exposed to a common body of information
on some disputed factual issue," say the researchers.
(I earlier reported on this particular Project study
here.)
Press relations gurus have long known the value of
credible spokespersons when an issue arises. For example,
if a company wants to assure the public that its products
are safe, they more or less automatically trot out a
woman expert who is also a mother to say so. If an environmental
lobby group wants to claim that a company's product
is killing people, they too more or less automatically
trot out a woman expert who is a mother to say so. The
Project researchers confirmed this insight with a survey
about attitudes toward proposals for the mandatory vaccination
of teenage girls with the new human papillomavirus (HPV)
vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. In this case
they exposed subjects to culturally identifiable advocates,
e.g., some men in suits and others without ties and
with facial hair.
In this case, when culturally identifiable hierarchal
and individualist experts argued unexpectedly in favor
mandatory vaccination against communitarian and egalitarian
experts who unexpectedly opposed it, polarization declined
as expected. In fact, individualists and communitarians
actually swapped places, with communitarians worrying
more about the risks of vaccination than the individualists
did (although the difference between the two groups
did not achieve statistical significance). So perhaps
when a well-known environmentalist such as Stewart Brand
comes out in
favor of nuclear power and genetically enhanced
crops, egalitarians and communitarians may be prompted
to reevaluate the risks and benefits of those technologies.
One additional survey dealt with the risks of terrorism
and national security. Both hierarchs and egalitarians
are very concerned about the risk of terrorism, but
differ radically on the source of the risk and what
how to deal with it. According to the survey egalitarians
believe that war in Iraq has increased the risk of a
terrorist attack while hierarchs don't. Individualists
also split with hierarchs on how best to handle the
risk of terrorist attacks. Individualists see great
risk in endowing the government with more authority
and thus oppose proposals such as reintroducing the
draft and allowing warrantless wiretaps.
In their earlier nanotechnology study, the Project
researchers concluded that that "mere dissemination
of scientifically sound information is not by itself
sufficient to overcome the divisive tendencies of cultural
cognition." In the new study, the researchers note that
when policies are framed so that they affirm rather
than threaten citizens' cultural values, people are
less likely to dismiss information that runs contrary
to their prior beliefs. In their conclusion, they hold
out the prospect of scholars someday "identifying [a]
deliberative process that make[s] it possible to fashion
regulatory policies that are both consistent with sound
scientific data and congenial to persons with
diverse cultural outlooks."
Hoping to devise such a deliberative process basically
ignores the fact that politics is often a zero sum game
in which some actors necessarily win and others must
lose. The facts is that the best solution to the culture
war is to shift more decision-making to the win/win
dynamic of markets which offers greater scope for citizens
to act on and express their diverse values. But of course,
I would say that since I culturally identify
as an individualist.
So is the proper framing of public policy issues really
enough to bring an end to the culture war? I doubt it.
After all, just who is going to make polluters, green
scaremongers, Republicans, gun control nuts, neocons,
fetus fetishists, Democrats, drug warriors, neo-luddites,
global warming catastrophists, climate change deniers
and the like stop distorting, I mean, framing the facts
to fit their cultural values?
Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His
most recent book, Liberation
Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech
Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.