[geo] Re: Geoengineering and Climate Change Polarization: Testing a Two-channel Model of Science Communication, Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci.
FYI, the lead author of that paper, Dan Kahan, posted two additional blog posts on culture, values, and geoengineering: http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/2/24/geoengineering-the-cultural-plasticity-of-climate-change-ris.html http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/2/26/geoengineering-the-science-communication-environment-the-cul.html On Thursday, February 27, 2014 2:04:00 AM UTC-6, andrewjlockley wrote: Poster's note : This is just brilliant. At last an explanation of why believing nonsense is rational. Useful to reflect on how this paper replies to the origin and persistence of other belief systems, as well as climate change. Leaves me wondering what nonsense I believe. http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/2/23/three-models-of-risk-perception-their-significance-for-self.html Three models of risk perception their significance for self-government Dan Kahan Posted on Sunday, February 23, 2014 at 7:52AM From Geoengineering and Climate Change Polarization: Testing a Two-channel Model of Science Communication, Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. (in press). Theoretical background Three models of risk perception The scholarly literature on risk perception and communication is dominated by two models. The first is the rational-weigher model, which posits that members of the public, in aggregate and over time, can be expected to process information about risk in a manner that promotes their expected utility (Starr 1969). The second is the irrational-weigher model, which asserts that ordinary members of the pubic lack the ability to reliably advance their expected utility because their assessment of risk information is constrained by cognitive biases and other manifestations of bounded rationality (Kahneman 2003; Sunstein 2005; Marx et al. 2007; Weber 2006).Neither of these models cogently explains public conflict over climate change—or a host of other putative societal risks, such as nuclear power, the vaccination of teenage girls for HPV, and the removal of restrictions on carrying concealed handguns in public. Such disputes conspicuously feature partisan divisions over facts that admit of scientific investigation. Nothing in the rational-weigher model predicts that people with different values or opposing political commitments will draw radically different inferences from common information. Likewise, nothing in the irrational-weigher model suggests that people who subscribe to one set of values are any more or less bounded in their rationality than those who subscribe to any other, or that cognitive biases will produce systematic divisions of opinion of among such groups. One explanation for such conflict is the cultural cognition thesis (CCT). CCT says that cultural values are cognitively prior to facts in public risk conflicts: as a result of a complex of interrelated psychological mechanisms, groups of individuals will credit and dismiss evidence of risk in patterns that reflect and reinforce their distinctive understandings of how society should be organized (Kahan, Braman, Cohen, Gastil Slovic 2010; Jenkins-Smith Herron 2009). Thus, persons with individualistic values can be expected to be relatively dismissive of environmental and technological risks, which if widely accepted would justify restricting commerce and industry, activities that people with such values hold in high regard. The same goes for individuals withhierarchical values, who see assertions of environmental risk as indictments of social elites. Individuals with egalitarian and communitarian values, in contrast, see commerce and industry as sources of unjust disparity and symbols of noxious self-seeking, and thus readily credit assertions that these activities are hazardous and therefore worthy of regulation (Douglass Wildavsky 1982). Observational and experimental studies have linked these and comparable sets of outlooks to myriad risk controversies, including the one over climate change (Kahan 2012).Individuals, on the CCT account, behave not as expected-utility weighers—rational or irrational—but rather as cultural evaluators of risk information (Kahan, Slovic, Braman Gastil 2006). The beliefs any individual forms on societal risks like climate change—whether right or wrong—do not meaningfully affect his or her personal exposure to those risks. However, precisely because positions on those issues are commonly understood to cohere with allegiance to one or another cultural style, taking a position at odds with the dominant view in his or her cultural group is likely to compromise that individual’s relationship with others on whom that individual depends for emotional and material support. As individuals, citizens are thus likely to do better in their daily lives when they adopt toward putative hazards the stances that express their commitment to values that they share with others,
RE: [geo] Re: Geoengineering and Climate Change Polarization: Testing a Two-channel Model of Science Communication, Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci.
This observation may bear repeating: To be effective, science communication must successfully negotiate both channels. That is, in addition to furnishing individuals with valid and pertinent information about how the world works, it must avail itself of the cues necessary to assure individuals that assenting to that information will not estrange them from their communities. Isn't this what good advertising does, and couldn't our community benefit from some cogent advice from Madison Ave, if we could afford it? Science and scientific reasoning alone apparently isn't enough, especially when there are (well funded) individuals who would cast such reasoning as a threat to their communities. Greg From: geoengineering@googlegroups.com [geoengineering@googlegroups.com] on behalf of David Morrow [dmorr...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, March 03, 2014 6:27 PM To: geoengineering@googlegroups.com Subject: [geo] Re: Geoengineering and Climate Change Polarization: Testing a Two-channel Model of Science Communication, Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. FYI, the lead author of that paper, Dan Kahan, posted two additional blog posts on culture, values, and geoengineering: http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/2/24/geoengineering-the-cultural-plasticity-of-climate-change-ris.html http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/2/26/geoengineering-the-science-communication-environment-the-cul.html On Thursday, February 27, 2014 2:04:00 AM UTC-6, andrewjlockley wrote: Poster's note : This is just brilliant. At last an explanation of why believing nonsense is rational. Useful to reflect on how this paper replies to the origin and persistence of other belief systems, as well as climate change. Leaves me wondering what nonsense I believe. http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2014/2/23/three-models-of-risk-perception-their-significance-for-self.html Three models of risk perception their significance for self-government Dan Kahan Posted on Sunday, February 23, 2014 at 7:52AM From Geoengineering and Climate Change Polarization: Testing a Two-channel Model of Science Communication, Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci. (in press). Theoretical background Three models of risk perception The scholarly literature on risk perception and communication is dominated by two models. The first is the rational-weigher model, which posits that members of the public, in aggregate and over time, can be expected to process information about risk in a manner that promotes their expected utility (Starr 1969). The second is the irrational-weigher model, which asserts that ordinary members of the pubic lack the ability to reliably advance their expected utility because their assessment of risk information is constrained by cognitive biases and other manifestations of bounded rationality (Kahneman 2003; Sunstein 2005; Marx et al. 2007; Weber 2006).Neither of these models cogently explains public conflict over climate change--or a host of other putative societal risks, such as nuclear power, the vaccination of teenage girls for HPV, and the removal of restrictions on carrying concealed handguns in public. Such disputes conspicuously feature partisan divisions over facts that admit of scientific investigation. Nothing in the rational-weigher model predicts that people with different values or opposing political commitments will draw radically different inferences from common information. Likewise, nothing in the irrational-weigher model suggests that people who subscribe to one set of values are any more or less bounded in their rationality than those who subscribe to any other, or that cognitive biases will produce systematic divisions of opinion of among such groups. One explanation for such conflict is the cultural cognition thesis (CCT). CCT says that cultural values are cognitively prior to facts in public risk conflicts: as a result of a complex of interrelated psychological mechanisms, groups of individuals will credit and dismiss evidence of risk in patterns that reflect and reinforce their distinctive understandings of how society should be organized (Kahan, Braman, Cohen, Gastil Slovic 2010; Jenkins-Smith Herron 2009). Thus, persons with individualistic values can be expected to be relatively dismissive of environmental and technological risks, which if widely accepted would justify restricting commerce and industry, activities that people with such values hold in high regard. The same goes for individuals withhierarchical values, who see assertions of environmental risk as indictments of social elites. Individuals with egalitarian and communitarian values, in contrast, see commerce and industry as sources of unjust disparity and symbols of noxious self-seeking, and thus readily credit assertions that these activities are hazardous and therefore worthy of regulation (Douglass Wildavsky 1982). Observational and experimental studies have linked these and
