chlamor
10-14-2007, 11:26 PM
The Culture War on Facts
Are you entitled to your own truth?
Ronald Bailey | October 9, 2007
"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."
<snip>
http://www.reason.com/news/show/122892.html
http://static.flickr.com/6/69250266_8c1f5c979c.jpg
Are you entitled to your own truth?
Ronald Bailey | October 9, 2007
"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."
<snip>
http://www.reason.com/news/show/122892.html
http://static.flickr.com/6/69250266_8c1f5c979c.jpg