PERCEIVED RISK AND THE SITING OF A CONTROVERSIAL ...

The importance of cultural biases and risk perception, and its relevance to policy
development, has been the subject of the Cultural Cognition Project, located at the Yale
Law School. This research group has sought to explain the polarization that frequently
accompanies risk perception and associated policy disputes (Kahan, Braman, Slovic,
Gastil, & Cohen, 2007). Their research is focused on a basic premise of cultural theory
introduced and consistently reiterated by Kahan: “that individuals can be expected to
form beliefs about societal dangers that reflect and reinforce their commitments to one or
another idealized form of social ordering” (Kahan, 2012, p. 726). Cultural cognition is
defined as: “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” (The Yale Law School, 2013). Using an empirical approach they
found cultural cognition can be used to measure, individuals’ cultural worldviews and
the social and psychological mechanisms that connect individuals. They showed that the
worldview typologies Douglas and Wildavsky identified (hierarchical, egalitarian,
individualistic and communitarian) were explanatory variables in risk perception and
supported what Kahan had found earlier. That “individuals form factual beliefs that
reflect and reinforce competing cultural orientations” (Kahan, 2008, p. 43). The four
typologies were visually explained on a grid with two axes. One axis (x axis) measured
how individualistic or communitarian a person was and the other (y axis) measured how
hierarchal or egalitarian they were. The grid was then compared to respondents’ answers
to survey questions.
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