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About the Project |
The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars from
Yale and
other universities interested in studying how
cultural values shape the public's risk perceptions and related policy
beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency
of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact
(e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death
penalty
deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to
values that define their cultural identities. Project members are using
the methods
of various disciplines -- including social psychology, anthropology,
communications, and political science -- to chart the impact of this
phenomenon and to
identify the mechanisms through which it operates.
The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify
processes of democratic decisionmaking by which society
can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that
is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks
and consistent with sound public
policymaking.
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Current Projects
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The Second National Risk & Culture Study
Americans are culturally polarized on a range of societal risks--from global warming to domestic terrorism, from school shootings to vaccination of school-age girls for HPV. Reporting the results of surveys and experiments involving some 5,000 Americans, the study identifies the causes of this condition and steps that can be taken to counteract it. [download study]
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Nanotechnology Risk Perceptions
What do members of the public think about the benefits and risks of nanotechnology? How will their views evolve as they learn more? How can goverment promote informed public deliberations about this novel science? Project members are conducting experimental studies to answer these questions.
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Facts and Law
Adjudication frequently turns on contested issues of fact (e.g., whether a battered woman who claims she killed in self-defense reasonably perceived an immediate threat of death), which must be determined either by juries or judges. CCP researchers are conducting experimental studies to determine how cultural values influence adjudicatory factual determinations and public reactions to the same. |
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Read more...
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Papers |
Based on a video shot from inside a police cruiser, the U.S. Supreme court concluded "no reasonable juror" could find that the risk posed by a fleeing motorist did not warrant deadly force (the deliberate ramming of his car) to stop him. But a study by the Cultural Cognition Project (forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review) finds that perceptions of risk among persons who viewed the tape were highly conditional on those persons' cultural worldviews. [ Download]
How does cultural conflict influence public policymaking? Surprisingly, not by generating moral disputes over the ends to be pursued by law but rather by generating empirical disagreements over the consequences of economic, crime-control, national security, and other policies designed to promote our common interests. [Download]
How individuals process information on nanotechnology risks is critically dependent on the perceived cultural values of the information source. The impact of this "cultural credibility heuristic," experimental data show, can either accentuate or mitigate cultural polarization with respect to nanotechnology risk perceptions. [download]
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