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Abstract

Why do members of the public disagree - sharply and persistently - about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The "cultural cognition of risk" refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals' beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed.

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... In this view, individual preferences can be understood only as being defined by (and maintained within) specific social contexts (Thompson et al., 1999). Other researchers, relying on the psychometric theory of risk and regarding cultural worldviews as stable features of individuals, have posited that culture is connected to perceptions of risk through a set of psychological processes (Kahan, 2012(Kahan, , 2011. In this view, individual preferences are based on a cultural appraisal of risk issues that leads people to impute specific meaning to risk situations, thus processing information in a manner that confirms their cultural orientation (Jenkins-Smith, 1993, 2001Kahan et al., 2017;Peters et al., 2004). ...
... None of these studies, yet, really combined the psychometric paradigm with the cultural theory of risk into an integrative model, enabling both approaches to help each other and shedding light on their relationship with perceived risk. The first attempt to fuse the cultural theory of risk with the psychometric paradigm has been undertaken by Kahan et al. (2011) into what they call the cultural cognition theory. Cultural cognition has endeavored to combine both approaches into a coalition framework that allows to shed light on the risk perception issue by means of both psychological and cultural explanations. ...
... In our view, this is an important contribution to the research on risk perception because (1) it meets a strategic expectation from Douglas (1997) to "marry" cultural theory and the psychometric theory of risk in order to better understand the perception of risk (see also Kahan, 2012) and (2) it allows to answer yes to the crucial question "is it possible to identify the hazard characteristics that moderate the association between people's values and risk perceptions?" that Arvai (2020, p. 2202) recently asked. By providing some new insight into how individuals' cultural worldviews contribute to their perceptions of risk, our work both joins and enriches Kahan's research path, as it sheds light on mechanisms connecting culture to risk perceptions (e.g., Kahan et al., 2007Kahan et al., , 2010Kahan et al., , 2011. This study is also in line with psychometric research pioneered by Slovic (1987). ...
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Cultural theory and the psychometric paradigm are two frameworks proposed to explain risk perceptions, mostly used independently of each other. On the one hand, psychometric research identified key characteristics of hazards responsible for their level of perceived riskiness. On the other hand, cultural studies provided evidence that different worldviews lead to divergent perceptions of risk in a way supportive of individuals’ cultural values. The purpose of this research was to combine both approaches into mediational models in which cultural values impact risk perceptions of controversial hazards through their influence on the characteristics associated with those hazards. Using data from an online survey completed by 629 French participants, findings indicated specific associations between cultural values and risk characteristics, both of them exhibiting effects on risk perceptions that depend largely on hazardous issues. More specifically, we found that people confer specific characteristics on hazards (common or dreadful, beneficial or costly, affecting few or many people), depending on whether they are hierarchists–individualists, egalitarians, or fatalists; in turn, such characteristics have an impact on the perceived riskiness of hazards such as cannabis, social movement, global warming, genetically modified organisms, nuclear power, public transportation, and coronavirus. Finally, this article discussed the interest of addressing the mechanisms that explain how cultural values shape individuals’ perceptions of risk.
... Although the scientific consensus on the anthropogenic nature of climate change strongly increased, beliefs about climate change did not evolve much within the public (Vandenbergh et al. 2014). In addition, the divide on anthropogenic climate change between liberals and conservatives has grown steadily as the question is becoming increasingly politicized and potentially disconnected from scientific evidence (Kahan et al. 2011). The costs of misinformed climate policies are high. ...
... Then, the trader considers adopting the model of her richest neighbor. For each trader, the willingness to revise her belief is determined by how ideologically loaded her belief is (Kahan et al. 2011), which is a parameter we vary in our experiments. ...
Preprint
Despite much scientific evidence, a large fraction of the American public doubts that greenhouse gases are causing global warming. We present a simulation model as a computational test-bed for climate prediction markets. Traders adapt their beliefs about future temperatures based on the profits of other traders in their social network. We simulate two alternative climate futures, in which global temperatures are primarily driven either by carbon dioxide or by solar irradiance. These represent, respectively, the scientific consensus and a hypothesis advanced by prominent skeptics. We conduct sensitivity analyses to determine how a variety of factors describing both the market and the physical climate may affect traders' beliefs about the cause of global climate change. Market participation causes most traders to converge quickly toward believing the "true" climate model, suggesting that a climate market could be useful for building public consensus.
... A predominant hypothesis in social psychology (e.g., Kahan 2013;Kahan et al. 2016;Lord et al. 1979;Molden and Higgins 2012;Taber and Lodge 2006) seeks to explain the puzzling epistemic behaviour registered in consumers of information in recent years with reference to politically motivated reasoning. Under the banner of this wider hypothesis, we find various research results that have been taken, in various ways, to support the view that a thinker's prior political convictions (including politically directed desires and attitudes about political group-membership) best explain why they are inclined to reject expert consensus when they do (Kahan 2013, Kahan et al. 2011. ...
... A second-wave of research in this area, led largely by Dan Kahan and his colleagues, has suggested that political ideology not only influences how we think about the persuasiveness of arguments for and against those ideologies themselves, but that our inclination to accept (or reject) scientific consensus across a range of areas is highly sensitive to what political ideology we already accept. For example, Kahan and his collaborators present studies aimed at demonstrating that background political ideology impacts whether we align with, or go against, expert consensus on topics ranging from global warming to the safety of nuclear power (Kahan et al. 2011;Kahan 2014;Kahan et al. 2016;cf., Carter and McKenna 2020). In light of this second wave of research, the received thinking about the data underlying the Gullible Sceptic Puzzle takes it to be principally a manifestation of politically motivated reasoning (Kahan 2013). ...
Article
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We have increasingly sophisticated ways of acquiring and communicating knowledge, yet, paradoxically, we are currently facing an unprecedented global ignorance crisis that affects our personal and societal well-being, as well as the stability of our democracies. There are two key triggers to this crisis, i.e. two crucial obstacles to learning: first, the widespread sharing of disinformation, which, in conjunction with an overly trusting audience, contributes to widely spread false beliefs, and correspondingly reckless political and social behaviour. At the same time, though, and at least as critical, is the prevalence of knowledge resistance and distrust in expertise. What we need to solve this high-stakes puzzle is a social epistemological framework that is able to explain the complex mechanisms underlying these surprising and unprecedented epistemic phenomena. This article will aim to sketch the contours of such a framework.
... Instrumental-value frames may only be effective when the alleged instrumental effects of a reintroduction are salient, demonstrable and widely accepted as credible to diverse publics. These are difficult criteria when scientific conclusions about anticipated outcomes of carnivore reintroduction are uncertain and may also be selectively heard, taken up, or recalled (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983;Kahan et al., 2011). Our study suggests that many people interpret the proposed grizzly bear reintroduction using primarily relational, rather than intrinsic or instrumental, value frames (e.g. ...
... Our study challenges the assumption that broad stakeholder groups would have similar beliefs and thus attitudes about grizzly bear reintroduction. Theories such as cultural cognition theories (Kahan et al., 2007(Kahan et al., , 2011) and values-belief-norm theory (Stern et al., 1999) suggest that stakeholder groups might be likely to share ...
Article
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The success or failure of apex carnivore reintroduction efforts can hinge on understanding and attending to diverse viewpoints of those involved in and impacted by reintroductions. Yet, viewpoints vary widely due to a suite of complex and intersecting factors, such as values, beliefs and sociocultural context. We ask, ‘what are the diverse viewpoints that exist surrounding apex carnivore recovery and what kinds of emotional, analytical and values‐based judgments might people use to construct their viewpoints?’ We used Q‐methodology to identify distinct, generalized viewpoints and areas of overlap and divergence between them, surrounding a proposal to reintroduce grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) to the North Cascades Ecosystem, USA. Q‐methodology combines qualitative and quantitative methods by asking purposefully sampled respondents to sort various statements on a given topic into an ordered grid. We found three distinct viewpoints among 67 respondents using factor analysis and responses to open‐ended questions about the sorting exercise. Two of these viewpoints represent essentially polarized perspectives corresponding to deeply normative notions about grizzly bear recovery, where one views reintroducing bears as a moral requisite, and the other views it as inappropriate and risky. These viewpoints primarily diverged on their perceptions of risk and perspectives about our collective responsibilities to and appropriate relationships with others (i.e. ‘relational values’). The third viewpoint was distinguished by its prioritization of practical considerations and views reintroducing bears as impractical and not sensible. Our analysis underscores the need to identify and attend to latent viewpoints that may be overlooked in the polarized public discourse as well as the multiple value systems and perceptions of risk that are integrated in perspectives on grizzly bear reintroduction. Additionally, our broadly defined identity groups were of very little utility in predicting viewpoints in this study, highlighting the importance of avoiding assumptions about people's views based on their identities and interests. We argue that forefronting conversations about responsibilities and appropriate relationships is critical for finding acceptable paths forward in such recovery efforts. We discuss the management implications of these findings for the North Cascades grizzly bear reintroduction, and for other large carnivore reintroductions. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
... In line with this reasoning, scientific consensus messages might be less effective when individuals are more familiar with the message 42 . Moreover, according to some motivated cognition accounts 43,44 , people whose previous worldviews and/or identities are not aligned with a given issue or its implications might not be receptive to scientific (consensus) information on the topic or even revise away from the scientific evidence. In line with this view, trust in climate scientists and political ideology might moderate the effectiveness of any consensus intervention, with those lower in trust and more politically on the right 6 being less likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate change. ...
... Contrary to some motivated cognition accounts and findings 43,44 , consensus messaging does not seem to backfire for people whose worldviews might not align with the scientific consensus on climate change, such as right-leaning individuals or those with lower trust in climate scientists. Rather, the present study supports previous research that found consensus messages to result in larger belief updating for those with right-leaning political ideologies 24,31 and extends this to those with lower trust in climate scientists, as these groups tend to have higher initial misperceptions. ...
Article
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Communicating the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is real increases climate change beliefs, worry and support for public action in the United States. In this preregistered experiment, we tested two scientific consensus messages, a classic message on the reality of human-caused climate change and an updated message additionally emphasizing scientific agreement that climate change is a crisis. Across online convenience samples from 27 countries (n = 10,527), the classic message substantially reduces misperceptions (d = 0.47, 95% CI (0.41, 0.52)) and slightly increases climate change beliefs (from d = 0.06, 95% CI (0.01, 0.11) to d = 0.10, 95% CI (0.04, 0.15)) and worry (d = 0.05, 95% CI (−0.01, 0.10)) but not support for public action directly. The updated message is equally effective but provides no added value. Both messages are more effective for audiences with lower message familiarity and higher misperceptions, including those with lower trust in climate scientists and right-leaning ideologies. Overall, scientific consensus messaging is an effective, non-polarizing tool for changing misperceptions, beliefs and worry across different audiences.
... Las percepciones globales sobre el CC varían según factores como ubicación, cultura, economía y género (Kahan et al., 2011), lo que sugiere la necesidad de enfoques educativos adaptados. Además, el currículo académico sobre el CC es a menudo deficiente. ...
... Las respuestas de los estudiantes sobre la relación del CC con distintos aspectos revelan dificultades para vincularlo con el consumismo, el consumo de carne y las migraciones. Los estudiantes asocian más la desforestación y las emisiones de CO2 de los automóviles con el CC, y la sequía como una consecuencia, lo que indica la influencia del contexto social y la cobertura mediática (Kahan et al., 2011;Bello et al., 2021). A la vez, parece que las problemáticas ecosociales que más relacionan con el CC son aquellas que, tradicionalmente, se conectan con contenidos de las áreas científicas, evidenciando la necesidad de aproximarse a la crisis climática des de una educación para la sostenibilidad más interdisciplinaria. ...
Chapter
Este estudio se centra en la importancia de la educación en la comprensión y acción frente al cambio climático, particularmente desde la perspectiva de los jóvenes. Se han investigado las percepciones y actitudes de estudiantes de secundaria que forman parte de la Red de Escuelas para la Sostenibilidad de Catalunya, un programa que promueve la educación ambiental en las escuelas. La metodología del estudio es cuantitativa y descriptiva, basada en encuestas y análisis de datos recopilados de los estudiantes. A través de este enfoque, se busca entender cómo los jóvenes perciben el cambio climático y qué acciones están dispuestos a tomar para mitigarlo. Los resultados muestran una conciencia significativa sobre el cambio climático, pero también revelan una brecha entre esta conciencia y la acción efectiva. Los estudiantes muestran interés y preocupación, pero a menudo carecen de las herramientas y el conocimiento necesarios para traducir esta preocupación en acciones concretas. Se destaca la necesidad de una educación ambiental que no solo se enfoque en el conocimiento científico sobre el cambio climático, sino que también incorpore aspectos de acción comunitaria y responsabilidad personal. Se propone que la educación sobre el cambio climático debe ser transversal y multidisciplinar, integrándose en diferentes áreas del currículo escolar y no limitándose a asignaturas específicas relacionadas con el medio ambiente. Además, se indica que es crucial fomentar una comprensión crítica del cambio climático, incluyendo sus causas socioeconómicas y políticas, así como sus impactos a largo plazo. Esto implica educar a los jóvenes no solo sobre los aspectos científicos del cambio climático, sino también sobre su relación con temas como la justicia social, la economía y la política. Finalmente, se propone una educación que empodere a los estudiantes para que se conviertan en agentes de cambio en sus comunidades. Esto incluye desarrollar habilidades prácticas, fomentar el pensamiento crítico y la creatividad, y proporcionar oportunidades para la participación activa en proyectos relacionados con la sostenibilidad y la protección del medio ambiente. TEXTO COMPLETO EN: http://hdl.handle.net/2445/216281
... Las percepciones globales sobre el CC varían según factores como ubicación, cultura, economía y género (Kahan et al., 2011), lo que sugiere la necesidad de enfoques educativos adaptados. Además, el currículo académico sobre el CC es a menudo deficiente. ...
... Las respuestas de los estudiantes sobre la relación del CC con distintos aspectos revelan dificultades para vincularlo con el consumismo, el consumo de carne y las migraciones. Los estudiantes asocian más la desforestación y las emisiones de CO2 de los automóviles con el CC, y la sequía como una consecuencia, lo que indica la influencia del contexto social y la cobertura mediática (Kahan et al., 2011;Bello et al., 2021). A la vez, parece que las problemáticas ecosociales que más relacionan con el CC son aquellas que, tradicionalmente, se conectan con contenidos de las áreas científicas, evidenciando la necesidad de aproximarse a la crisis climática des de una educación para la sostenibilidad más interdisciplinaria. ...
Poster
La sociedad actual está inmersa en una crisis ecosocial y la educación juega un papel fundamental. La universidad tiene el reto de impulsar los valores relacionados con la transición ecosocial y potenciar la educación para la sostenibilidad desde un enfoque complejo, reconociendo su naturaleza transnacional y multidimensional. El propósito de esta investigación es analizar las representaciones sociales de estudiantes universitarios con diversidad de perfiles como agentes educativos (Grado de Maestros en Educación Infantil, en Educación Primaria, en Educación Social, en Pedagogía, en enfermería y en el Máster de Profesorado) grado de educación social y pedagogía en relación con el cambio climático, la pérdida de biodiversidad y el bienestar y la salud. El objetivo es evaluar el conocimiento de los y las estudiantes sobre estos temas y cómo se pueden incorporar eficazmente en los planes de estudio. Se ha pasado un cuestionario de respuesta múltiple y respuesta abierta a una muestra aleatoria e intencionada de estudiantes y se ha realizado un análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de los datos. Los resultados indican una falta de conocimiento sobre estos temas, con diferencias significativas en función del grado de origen de los estudiantes. Además, se observa una simplificación en la comprensión de las causas y soluciones de los problemas ecosociales, lo que sugiere la necesidad de un enfoque más holístico y complejo en la enseñanza. Como conclusión, se pone de manifiesto la necesidad de mejorar el ES, superando enfoques reduccionistas y promoviendo la comprensión interconectada de los factores ambientales, sociales y económicos.
... Además, investigaciones como la de Kahan et al. (2011) revelan que las personas poseen una comprensión y creencias diversas en referencia al CC, dependiendo de factores como la ubicación geográfica, influencias culturales, su bienestar, su género, etc., lo que dificulta la extrapolación de evidencias y estrategias aplicadas en diferentes partes del mundo. ...
... Sin embargo, existe una falta de estudios sobre cómo se está implementando realmente la educación en CC, qué efecto está teniendo en el alumnado y qué enfoques educativos y estrategias metodológicas se están siguiendo al abordar el CC en el ámbito educativo, especialmente en Cataluña. Cabe destacar que, como se ha mencionado, la comprensión de este fenómeno varía según la ubicación y la cultura (Kahan et al., 2011). Por lo tanto, se requieren estudios geográficamente localizados para ofrecer respuestas adecuadas a las necesidades de cada área geográfica en particular. ...
Chapter
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Desde la adopción del Acuerdo de París, la educación ha sido reconocida internacionalmente como una herramienta esencial para la información pública, la sensibilización y la participación en la lucha contra el cambio climático (CC) (ONU, 2015, artículo 12). Pero diferentes estudios sobre el conocimiento de la ciudadanía sobre este tema muestran gran cantidad de conceptos erróneos independientemente de su origen. Así pues, el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje del CC debe analizarse en profundidad para paliar este déficit. El objetivo de este trabajo es la de analizar las representaciones sociales entorno al CC del alumnado de educación secundaria que participan en el programa de escuelas verdes de Cataluña. Para ello, se administró un cuestionario a una muestra de 530 estudiantes pertenecientes a ocho escuelas verdes de Cataluña en el que se les preguntó sobre diferentes aspectos relacionados con el cambio climático. Entre los resultados obtenidos destacan grandes dudas e incongruencias respecto a los conocimientos relacionados con el efecto del CO2, su origen, el efecto invernadero y como este afecta a la vida en la tierra. En cuanto a la realidad del CC, prácticamente todos los alumnos creen que el cambio climático es real, pero un 43% cree que se habla de este exageradamente. Por último, respecto a las medidas a adoptar para combatir el cambio climático, el 81% apuesta por medidas como el reciclaje, sin ahondar en el origen de los problemas o en las interacciones entre estos y el resto de sus acciones. Por norma general, suele haber diferencias significativas por curso, siendo 4rto de la ESO el que responde mejor o más seguro respecto 3ero y 2ndo. También las suele haber por itinerario, siendo el alumnado de optativas científicas el que responde mejor y con mayor seguridad. No se observan diferencias significativas entre sexos en las respuestas, aunque si hay diferencias entre institutos que podemos relacionar con las metodologías de enseñanza utilizadas y su localización. Si bien es evidente que para el alumnado el efecto invernadero existe, la mayoría lo interpretan como un fenómeno antropogénico con efectos negativos en la biosfera y además los resultados demuestran mucha confusión en el alumnado. Se hace necesario, por tanto, un enfoque más holístico sobre el ciclo de diferentes gases como el CO2. Además, la falta de información clara sobre cómo el cambio climático afecta su vida cotidiana indica la necesidad de contextualizar estos conceptos en la realidad diaria del estudiante. El hecho de que la mitad del alumnado considere que se habla exageradamente, sugiere que la calidad de la información es más importante que la cantidad. Así lo demuestra el hecho de que a pesar de que son conscientes de la importancia de reducir los gases de efecto invernadero, el reciclaje es mencionado como una solución por el 80% de los encuestados, lo que demuestra una falta de comprensión de las consecuencias. Como conclusión, es necesario una reformulación en los enfoques educativos utilizados para abordar la cuestión del cambio climático que permita al alumnado una mejor compresión de este fenómeno.
... La credibilidad del discurso científico se debe fundamentar en la exposición de los hechos y no en las características del expositor. Sin embargo, muchos estudios demuestran que existen sesgos diversos que afectan la verosimilitud académica (Heffernan, 2022;Braman & Kahan, 2011). Entre estos sesgos se encuentra el sesgo de género. ...
Article
Full-text available
Este estudio analizó el sesgo de género que presentan 297 estudiantes de bachillerato, con una edad promedio de 15 años, al solicitarles revisar textos cortos de divulgación científica que exploran la relación entre la violencia y el estado bioquímico de las personas. Se utilizaron dos "cuestionarios espejo" para evaluar este sesgo en una escala del 0 al 10. Un grupo de 181 estudiantes respondió al primer cuestionario, mientras que otro grupo de 116 respondió al segundo. Ambos cuestionarios incluían preguntas de control y dos secciones de prueba. En el primer cuestionario, la primera sección de prueba presentaba información sobre una investigadora experta, incluyendo su fotografía, seguida de una nota que mencionaba nombres de investigadores varones. En el segundo cuestionario, se intercambiaron el género de la persona experta y los nombres mencionados en la nota. De esta manera, un grupo de estudiantes sirvió como control para el otro entre secciones. El análisis de los datos involucró la comparación de los cuestionarios y el cálculo de índices estadísticos para cada pregunta. Se determinó estadísticamente el promedio, desviación estándar y moda para cada pregunta y grupo. Al integrar los resultados, se evaluó cuál género recibió valoraciones más altas o si hubo empates. Los resultados indicaron que el género femenino obtiene mejores evaluaciones promedio de cada pregunta, mientras que en cinco de trece preguntas evaluadas con moda los varones alcanzan mejores evaluaciones.
... Taking a different approach, Kahan and colleagues conceive of political identity as a person's "cultural worldview," or how a person views society in relation to social mobility and inequality (Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, and Braman 2011). 5 This approach, while conceptually unique from the intergroup approach that dominates political science, also consistently finds an association between political identity and people's positions on abortion, concealed carry, the death penalty, scientific consensus, vaccine use, and several other "hot button" political issues (Kahan and Braman 2006;Kahan et al. 2010;. ...
Research
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For nearly a century, the claim that expertise leads to influence has been axiomatic in social psychology, yet this tradition of research cannot explain why people sometimes resist expert influence. I attempt to fill this gap by synthesizing communications research on the message and its properties, political science research on identity, and the perceptual control system branch of identity theory. I argue that identity is a "missing link" in research on social influence-one that helps explain resistance to expert influence. Focusing on the role of the political identity, I propose that politicized messages convey underlying, implicit meanings relevant to one's political identity. Discrepancies between these meanings and the political identity standard contribute to the resistance of expertise by impacting perceptions of message favorability, negative emotion, and the likelihood of deprecating the message source. To test these claims, survey respondents (50% Democrats, 50% Republicans) used a novel measure of political identity to rate themselves as well as evaluate ten partisan statements, each of which were attributed to an expert source and focused on "hot-button" political issues. Overall, identity-message discrepancies significantly impacted participants' perceptions of message favorability, negative emotions, and likelihood of deprecating expert sources; however, they did not always do so in a manner consistent with identity theory, and effects sometimes differed for Democrat and Republican respondents. With the exception of the impact of identity-message discrepancies on source deprecation, my findings were more nuanced than expected. I discuss the implications of my research for public policy and for future work in social psychology and political science.
... Research suggests that aspects of personal and social identity or values are also important (see for example Kahan et al., 2011;Landrum (2020) is a video that is a particularly useful resource in exploring this point). This is so especially when a topic is politically charged or otherwise bound up with identity. ...
Book
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'Public engagement with science' is gaining currency as the framing for outreach activities related to science. However, knowledge bearing on the topic is siloed in a variety of disciplines, and public engagement activities often are conducted without support from relevant theory or familiarity with related activities. This first Element in the Public Engagement with Science series sets the stage for the series by delineating the target of investigation, establishing the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration and community partnerships for effective public engagement with science, examining the roles public engagement with science plays in academic institutions, and providing initial resources about the theory and practice of public engagement with science. Useful to academics who would like to conduct or study public engagement with science, but also to public engagement practitioners as a window into relevant academic knowledge and cultures. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
... This study contributes to the field of science communication by highlighting the importance of understanding the rhetorical strategies and motivations behind denialist discourses. One of the main motivations for these comments is related to psychological resistance to scientific consensus and adopting climate measures, especially in contexts where trust in scientific institutions and the media can be low (Kahan et al., 2011). In addition, using fallacies such as ad hominem and false equivalence suggests a conscious effort to divert the debate to peripheral topics or undermine the credibility of sources, which aligns with theories of "uncertainty propagation" (Oreskes & Conway, 2010). ...
Article
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Climate denialism represents a significant challenge to public awareness and the implementation of effective environmental policies. In Portugal, as in other countries, social networks have been the place where denialist ideas are disseminated, influencing the public perception of the climate crisis. This research aims to understand how denialist discourse manifests and spreads on digital platforms. The research question of this work is: how does climate denialist discourse manifest itself on social media in Portugal? This work has two objectives: (1) to analyze the arguments and discursive strategies used by climate deniers in comments on Facebook, specifically on the pages of the three largest Portuguese newspapers, and (2) to understand the social and discursive dynamics that underpin their beliefs. This work adopted a qualitative methodology that involved manual data collection during the month of September 2024. Posts about climate that were informative were selected. The comments were examined manually and categorized by type of discourse. This approach enabled capturing specific nuances and contexts of denial discourses, providing a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. The study concluded that (I) comments that use fallacies or rhetoric that deny the climate crisis tended to receive more “likes” and approval from users; (II) fallacies that do not offer scientific evidence to refute the existence of climate change were identified in all these comments.
... However, in the case of harassment of scientists, it is not the societal problem (e.g., virus outbreak, climate change) that is perceived as threatening, but scientists' proposed solutions (e.g., vaccination, regulation of economy). Therefore, science and scientists can be seen as threatening one's physical and economic safety, or values such as freedom 51,52 . Such threat perception could then fuel radical behavior toward scientists such as harassment. ...
Article
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Anti-science movements brought more than public distrust in science. Perhaps even more worryingly, these movements are also associated with instances of harassment of—and violence against—scientists. However, virtually nothing is known about individuals likely to harass or harm scientists. Across two pre-registered studies (total N = 749), we investigated the role of worldviews (e.g., political ideology, conspiracy mentality, science cynicism), radicalization risk factors (relative deprivation and threat), and personality traits and how these relate to harassment of scientists (both attitudes and behavior). We found that science cynicism–the perception that scientists are incompetent and corrupt–drives approval of scientists’ harassment (attitudes), as well as harmful behavior (e.g., refusing to donate money, not signing a petition). Additionally, perceiving scientists as threatening, as well as dark personality traits (psychopathy and narcissism), contributed to approving scientists’ harassment. Overall, the present research takes a first step in identifying predictors of the willingness to harm scientists.
... Las percepciones sobre el CC varían enormemente y están influenciadas por factores como la ubicación, cultura, economía y género, lo que sugiere la necesidad de adaptar los enfoques educativos (Kahan et al., 2011). Además, se ha criticado la insuficiencia del currículum académico en CC y la falta de preparación adecuada entre los educadores para abordar este tema crítico (Bello et al., 2021;Boon, 2016;Stevenson et al., 2017). ...
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Este capítulo explora la relación entre la gestión de residuos y el cambio climático (CC) en el contexto de la educación secundaria, utilizando un enfoque mixto para analizar las percepciones de estudiantes de la red de Escuelas Verdes de Cataluña. Participaron 620 estudiantes de ESO, quienes justificaron la conexión entre la gestión de residuos y el CC mediante respuestas a un cuestionario que incluyó tanto preguntas cerradas como abiertas. Los resultados indican que el 54% de los estudiantes percibe una relación directa entre ambos fenómenos, aunque solo el 21,3% de las justificaciones fueron científicamente correctas y vinculadas explícitamente al CC. Las categorías emergentes incluyen conceptos como la contaminación atmosférica y la reducción del consumo, pero carecen de profundidad en aspectos clave como la producción de metano en vertederos o la conservación de recursos naturales. Esto refleja una comprensión limitada del CC y de sus vínculos con las problemáticas ecosociales. El estudio destaca la necesidad de estrategias educativas que promuevan una comprensión integral del CC, incorporando pensamiento crítico, innovación y aprendizaje activo. Además, subraya la importancia de una educación climática adaptativa que fortalezca la resiliencia y la capacidad de acción de los estudiantes frente al CC. Limitaciones como el sesgo del autorreporte y las diferencias en la maduración cognitiva entre los participantes deben considerarse al interpretar los hallazgos. Finalmente, el capítulo aboga por integrar transversalmente la educación climática en los currículos para mejorar la conciencia y las habilidades de los estudiantes en la mitigación y adaptación al CC.
... The contemporary antivaccination movement reflects a broad spectrum of scepticism towards vaccine efficacy. It is influenced by cultural predispositions and cognitive styles (Kahan et al., 2011), by a complex relationship with analytic thinking (Swami et al., 2014), and by education, which predicts a range of cognitive, emotional and social outcomes (Van Prooijen, 2017). In general, this scepticism is only partially due to educational deficits. ...
Article
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The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to numerous conspiracy theories, focusing on topics such as vaccine effectiveness, the virus’s origin and public health measures. These narratives have spread rapidly through social and traditional media, influencing public perception and behaviour towards vaccination efforts. In particular, they have contributed significantly to vaccine hesitancy. This study focuses on Italy, where narratives linking COVID-19 vaccinations to sudden deaths have gained significant traction. By conducting a thorough investigation into post-vaccination mortality rates, this study aims to shed light on the true nature of the data regarding deaths and mortality rates in Italy. The study uses a Difference-In-Differences (DID) framework to analyse post-vaccination mortality rates across Italian municipalities from 2018 to 2023. Results indicate that the overall mortality rate did not significantly increase following the vaccination campaign, and the impact varied across different demographic groups and regions, indicating disparities in healthcare delivery, public health strategies and demographic factors between the North and the South. This study contributes innovatively by providing empirical evidence from Italy, addressing a critical gap in understanding the relationship between vaccination and public health outcomes.
... It is clear, however, that, as our opinion about a certain subject changes, so does our opinion about the person who influenced us. And, in reverse, it is also true that we interpret the same information differently depending on its source [25]. Here, we will present a generalization of the CODA model where the agents change their opinions about the issue and also about the reliability of the other agents. ...
Preprint
A model for the joint evolution of opinions and how much the agents trust each other is presented. The model is built using the framework of the Continuous Opinions and Discrete Actions (CODA) model. Instead of a fixed probability that the other agents will decide in the favor of the best choice, each agent considers that other agents might be one one of two types: trustworthy or useless. Trustworthy agents are considered more likely to be right than wrong, while the opposite holds for useless ones. Together with the opinion about the discussed issue, each agent also updates that probability for each one of the other agents it interacts withe probability each one it interacts with is of one type or the other. The dynamics of opinions and the evolution of the trust between the agents are studied. Clear evidences of the existence of two phases, one where strong polarization is observed and the other where a clear division is permanent and reinforced are observed. The transition seems signs of being a first-order transition, with a location dependent on both the parameters of the model and the initial conditions. This happens despite the fact that the trust network evolves much slower than the opinion on the central issue.
... Todos muestran la separación entre el CC de expertos y el de legos. Esos estudios tienen en común que se asientan en, o intentan criticar, un mismo modelo llamado por sus proponentes Modelo Mental (Bostrom et al. 1994) o, en una variante algo más sofisticada, Modelo de la Cognición Cultural (Kahan et al. 2011), y por sus críticos, Modelo del Déficit de Conocimiento. En síntesis, proponen que el público en general o es científicamente ignorante e incompetente o es víctima de sesgos cognitivos que lo incapacitan para enfrentar racionalmente las situaciones inciertas o ha interiorizado un paradigma cultural refractario a lo que los expertos proponen. ...
Article
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Este trabajo aborda la incertidumbre, foco central del actual debate epistemológico, en una triple concreción sociológica. En primer lugar, concreción temática: la incertidumbre en el ámbito del cambio climático (CC, en adelante). En segundo lugar, se fija en actores concretos: expertos en ese ámbito. Y tercero: concreta una observación empírica, con entrevistas a expertos españoles en CC. Se asume una perspectiva emic, atenta al habla de los expertos sobre sentido, localización y gestión de la incertidumbre climática. Como recoge la sucesión de los distintos informes del IPCC, la incertidumbre ha sido y es asunto central de reflexión en el estudio del CC. Dado que son los expertos los que la definen, clasifican, miden y comunican al resto de la ciudadanía, su estudio debe pasar necesariamente por la indagación de su peculiar relación con la heterogénea comunidad de los expertos. Tras dar cuenta de la relevancia dada a la incertidumbre en los informes del IPCC, se propone una reconstrucción selectiva del debate sobre la experticia y la incertidumbre, presentando algunos resultados de las indagaciones sobre el tema en España, para centrar después la atención en el análisis de las evidencias aportadas por una investigación cualitativa, concluyendo con los principales resultados alcanzados. Uncertainty is one of the central issues in the current epistemological debate. This paper proposes to approach it within the framework of a triple sociological concretion. First, a thematic concretion: uncertainty in the field of climate change. Second, it focuses on specific actors: experts in the field of climate change. And third, it is based on an empirical sociological observation of qualitative interviews with a significant sample of Spanish climate change experts. Thus, an emic perspective is adopted, paying attention to what the experts say about the meaning, location, and management of uncertainty. Uncertainty has been and continues to be a central topic of reflection in the study of climate change, as shown by the succession of different IPCC reports. Since it is the experts who define, classify, measure, and communicate the uncertainty of climate change to the rest of the citizens, its study must necessarily include the observation of the peculiar relationship with the heterogeneous community of experts. This work aims to make a contribution in this respect. After an account of the importance given to uncertainty in the IPCC reports, it proposes a selective reconstruction of the debate on expertise and uncertainty, presenting some of the results of research on the subject in Spain, to then focus attention on the analysis of the evidence provided by recent qualitative research, and to end with some conclusions that identify the main results obtained.
... Las percepciones sobre el CC varían enormemente y están influenciadas por factores como la ubicación, cultura, economía y género, lo que sugiere la necesidad de adaptar los enfoques educativos (Kahan et al., 2011). Además, se critica las carencias del currículum académico en CC y la falta de preparación adecuada entre los educadores para abordar este tema crítico (Bello et al., 2021;Boon, 2016;Stevenson et al., 2017). ...
Conference Paper
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La educación para el cambio climático (EdCC) se ha consolidado como herramienta vital, reconocida a nivel global, para abordar los retos que plantea el cambio climático (CC) y concienciar a la ciudadanía. La sequía emerge como uno de los contextos más vinculados con el CC por el alumnado de educación secundaria. El objetivo de este estudio es determinar cuáles son las justificaciones que aparecen en esta vinculación. Para ello, se analizan las justificaciones en la vinculación de la sequía con el CC de 621 estudiantes de 10 centros de la XESC, a través de la creación de una red sistémica inductiva. El estudio revela que un 54% de las respuestas de los estudiantes mencionan el CC en sus respuestas, aunque que la mayoría de estas son superficiales o irrelevantes. Se destaca la necesidad de fortalecer la EdCC para mejorar la capacidad de justificación del alumnado, sugiriendo una correlación más precisa cuando la vinculación con el CC es reconocida.
... Based on previous research studies (e.g., Adamus et al., 2023;Lacroix & Gifford, 2018;Sobotova et al., 2024), that addressed the gap between people's environmental values and proenvironmental behavior, we decided to include four variables as indicators of environmental value orientation: communitarian and egalitarian cultural values, future orientation, and environmental identity. We used six items of the short Hierarchy-egalitarianism-individualismcommunitarianism scale reported by Kahan et al. (2011) to measure communitarian (three items; e.g. "Sometimes government needs to make laws that keep people from hurting themselves") and egalitarian cultural value orientations (three items; e.g. ...
Preprint
The primary aim of the current study was to investigate whether moral disengagement and associated negative emotions (guilt, shame and anxiety) could explain the green gap, i.e. the disparity between environmental values or climate concerns and pro-environmental behavior. The secondary aim was to test potential interventions that could reduce the tendency to morally disengage from climate change and, consequently, enhance pro-environmental behavior. First, in a large cross-sectional study (N1 = 1233), we investigated moral disengagement and negative climate emotions as serial mediators in the relationship between climate concerns and pro-environmental behavior (Study 1). Then, we replicated these findings in a two-wave longitudinal study (N2 = 1308) and attempted to reduce moral disengagement with either an awareness-empowerment or social norms intervention (Study 2). The results corroborated our mediation model where climate concerns predicted pro-environmental behavior and this was partially mediated by lower moral disengagement and higher experienced negative emotions. Also, we found awareness-empowerment intervention to be effective in reducing moral disengagement and, indirectly, motivating pro-environmental behavior. The study thus provides persuasive evidence that moral disengagement contributes to the green gap and that interventions aimed at its reduction might constitute a fruitful way of motivating effortful but impactful pro-environmental behavior.
... Todos muestran la separación entre el CC de expertos y el de legos. Esos estudios tienen en común que se asientan en, o intentan criticar, un mismo modelo llamado por sus proponentes Modelo Mental (Bostrom et al. 1994) o, en una variante algo más sofisticada, Modelo de la Cognición Cultural (Kahan et al. 2011), y por sus críticos, Modelo del Déficit de Conocimiento. En síntesis, proponen que el público en general o es científicamente ignorante e incompetente o es víctima de sesgos cognitivos que lo incapacitan para enfrentar racionalmente las situaciones inciertas o ha interiorizado un paradigma cultural refractario a lo que los expertos proponen. ...
Article
Full-text available
Este trabajo aborda la incertidumbre, foco central del actual debate epis-temológico, en una triple concreción sociológica. En primer lugar, concreción temática: la incertidumbre en el ámbito del cambio climático (CC). En segundo lugar, se fija en actores concretos: expertos en ese ámbito. Y tercero: concreta una observación empírica con entrevistas a expertos españoles en CC. Se asume una perspectiva emic, atenta al habla de los expertos sobre sentido, localización y gestión de la incertidumbre climática. Como recogen los distintos informes del IPCC, la incertidumbre ha sido y es asunto central de reflexión en el estudio del CC. Dado que son los expertos los que la definen, clasifican, miden y comunican al resto de la ciudadanía, su estudio debe pasar necesariamente por la indagación de su peculiar relación con la heterogénea comunidad de los expertos. Tras dar cuenta de la relevancia dada a la incertidumbre en los informes del IPCC, se propone una reconstrucción selectiva del debate sobre la experticia y la incertidumbre, presentando algunos resultados de las indagaciones sobre el tema en España, para centrar después la atención en el análisis de las evidencias aportadas por una investigación cualitativa, concluyendo con los principales resultados alcanzados.
... Several of these mechanisms (particularly IPT1, 3 and 4) are examples of where the cultural background of the individual has shaped the process by which they acquire and interpret information. This is described as 'cultural cognition' referring to a 'tendency of individuals to confirm their beliefs around disputed matters of fact' particularly apparent in this sector where there is a paucity of outcome data [32]. The relation between these IPTs is not always apparent, due to the differing contexts, yet the system-level IPTs (7 and 8) are likely to be assimilated from multiple, smaller, contributing mechanisms described in IPTs 1-6, which shape individual and organisational values and a systemwide culture of continual learning about the PRS locally and the health and wellbeing of tenants. ...
Article
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Background Housing is an important wider determinant of health. Private Rented Sector (PRS) housing is generally the worst quality of housing stock across tenures. Although a wide range of interventions are available to local governments to manage and improve the quality of PRS housing and therefore the health of tenants, there is limited evidence about the extent to which these are used. This study aims to explore what drives the use of different interventions in different local governments, to better understand and inform local strategies. Methods As the first realist evaluation on this topic, the range of available interventions was informed by a Local Government Association toolkit. Consistent with realist approaches, retroductive analysis of intervention-context-mechanism-outcome configurations helped to develop and refine Initial Programme Theories (IPTs). Data sources included local government housing documents, a survey and eleven semi-structured interviews with housing officers. Results Using data for 22 out of the 30 local governments in the South West region of the United Kingdom, eight IPTs were developed which act on different levels from individual PRS team leaders to system wide. The IPTs include a belief in market forces, risk adverse to legal challenge, attitude to enforcement, relational approaches to partnership working, job security and renumeration, financial incentives drive action, and system-level understanding of the drivers of poor health, inequalities and opportunities for cost-savings. The findings suggest that limited objective health outcomes are being used to understand impact, which hinders interpretation of the effectiveness of all mechanisms. Conclusion Interventions that bring about positive outcomes in managing PRS housing are unlikely to be universal; they depend on the context which differs across place and over time. The proposed IPTs highlight the need for strategies to be tailored considering the local context and should be evaluated in subsequent phases of study.
... Entre ells, es troben les idees errònies i conceptes mal interpretats pels estudiants (Cordero, 2002;Daniel et al., 2004;Dawson, 2015;García-Vinuesa et al., 2021;Michail et al., 2007), així com la dificultat per assimilar els efectes del CC degut a la seva naturalesa distant i l'absència de recompenses immediates per adoptar mesures preventives (Moser, 2010;Nicholls, 2016). Les percepcions sobre el CC varien enormement i estan influenciades per factors com la ubicació, cultura, economia i gènere, el que suggereix la necessitat d'adaptar els enfocaments educatius (Kahan et al., 2011). A més, es critica les mancances del currículum acadèmic en CC i la falta de preparació adequada entre els educadors per abordar aquest tema crític (Bello et al., 2021;Boon, 2016;Stevenson et al., 2017). ...
Conference Paper
L'educació per al canvi climàtic (EdCC) s'ha consolidat com a eina vital, reconeguda a nivell global, per abordar els reptes que planteja el canvi climàtic (CC) i conscienciar la ciutadania. La desforestació emergeix com un dels contextos més vinculats amb el CC per l’alumnat d’educació secundària. L’objectiu d’aquest estudi és determinar quines son les justificacions que hi ha darrere aquesta vinculació. Per fer-ho, s’analitzen les justificacions en la vinculació de la desforestació amb el CC de 621 alumnes de 10 centres de la XESC, a través de la creació d’una xarxa sistèmica inductiva. L'estudi revela que només un 20% de les respostes dels estudiants vinculen correctament la desforestació amb el CC, mentre la majoria d'arguments són superficials o irrellevants. Es destaca la necessitat d'enfortir l'educació sobre el CC per millorar la capacitat d'argumentació de l'alumnat, suggerint una correlació més precisa quan la vinculació amb el CC és reconeguda.
... Within political psychology, scholars have identified directional motivated reasoning as a likely mechanism by which elite cues shape mass opinion. In this cognitive process, individuals seek out and give more weight to information that confirms their prior beliefs (including their partisan affiliations), while giving less weight to contradictory information (Kahan et al., 2011;Taber & Lodge, 2006). ...
Article
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The United States faces multiple political challenges to achieving the rapid cuts in carbon emissions called for by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among these are the long-standing issue of partisan polarization and the newly emerging problem of climate doom and defeatism. These challenges are not only barriers to agenda-setting and enactment, but can also threaten the durability of policies over time. This study uses a survey experiment from a nationally representative sample (n = 1760) to examine the impact of partisan cues and fatalistic rhetoric on support for the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. We find that Republicans and Independents exposed to Democratic Party cues expressed less support for the IRA. We also find that Independents respondents exposed to a fatalistic message had reduced support for the IRA. These findings underscore the importance of framing in the post-enactment period and suggest that the IRA may be vulnerable to retrenchment or reversal.
... This partisan account argues that people are not reliable truth-trackers, but rather motivated reasoners who desire confirmation of their political identities, to win and defeat their political foes, and to never admit fault. Rather than approaching information on social media through a critical and impartial lens, individuals are said to engage in "identity-protective cognition" in which they resist information which contradicts their pre-existing political views and too easily accept content which reaffirms them (Kahan 2012;Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, and Braman 2011;Sherman and Cohen 2006). ...
Article
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Deliberative democracy is increasingly criticised as out of touch with the realities of partisan politics. This paper considers the rise of fake and hyperpartisan news as one source of this scepticism. While popular accounts often blame such content on citizens' political biases and motivated reasoning, I survey the empirical evidence and argue that it does not support strong claims about the inability of citizens to live up to deliberative ideals. Instead, much of this research is shown to support the deliberative capacities of citizens and points to their potential in helping to reduce the spread of false and misleading content.
... Cognitive trust reinforces confirming but not disconfirming evidence (Entin & Serfaty, 2017). Kahn et al. (2010) found individuals are more likely to believe information from an expert when it agrees with their previously held position rather than when it is at odds with their earlier position. ...
Article
Followers’ trust can build the leader’s influence and the followers’ trust in the leader’s mission. Cognitive (based on perceptions of ability and predictability) and affective (based on perceptions of benevolence and integrity) trust between Christ and His twelve disciples enabled movement to group performance and acceptance of Him as Savior and His Great Commission. The disciples began with knowledge-driven cognitive trust and transitioned to experience-driven affective trust. Tuckman’s model may be used to assess group development.
... 4). Yet, teaching the causes of climate change can differ based on the individual teacher's beliefs and geographic location (Kahan et al. 2011). For instance, Khalidi and Ramsey (2020) found that teachers' perceptions of climate change differed based on if they were located in California, traditionally a blue state, or Texas, traditionally a red state. ...
Article
In order to produce a climate-literate society willing to take action, students must be educated on the causes, changes, impacts, and solutions of climate change. One way to ensure students are educated on climate change is to have robust science standards. However, little is known about the collective climate change standards in the United States (US). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to conduct an analysis of the US K-12 science standards to uncover where the climate change standards are located in different grade levels and the extent to which the collective US curriculum covers topics of climate change. This study was a qualitative content analysis of US K-12 climate change standards. The results show that most US climate change standards are found within the high school grade levels and the Earth and Space Science domains. All US states address topics of climate change within their standards, however general mentions of climate change were cited most often. Finally, the majority of states address both natural and anthropogenic causes of climate change. Implications for policy makers and educators are included.
... However, social contagion models rarely consider the psychological/ cognitive basis of social contagion. Instead of starting from cognitive mechanisms to derive contagion dynamics, studies assume dynamics and do not account for complex belief interactions within individuals, although these interactions could be integral to social contagion and responsible for counterintuitive phenomena (35)(36)(37). A wide gap still exists between models of cognitive processes and models of social contagion (38), although the effect of the human predisposition to have a coherent set of beliefs (39) on social contagion has been of recent interest (40)(41)(42)(43)(44). ...
Article
Social contagion is a ubiquitous and fundamental process that drives individual and social changes. Although social contagion arises as a result of cognitive processes and biases, the integration of cognitive mechanisms with the theory of social contagion remains an open challenge. In particular, studies on social phenomena usually assume contagion dynamics to be either simple or complex, rather than allowing it to emerge from cognitive mechanisms, despite empirical evidence indicating that a social system can exhibit a spectrum of contagion dynamics—from simple to complex—simultaneously. Here, we propose a model of interacting beliefs, from which both simple and complex contagion dynamics can organically arise. Our model also elucidates how a fundamental mechanism of complex contagion—resistance—can come about from cognitive mechanisms.
... A competing hypothesis is the cultural cognition theory. This assumes that people form their perception of risks based on the perceptions of the groups with whom they identify (Kahan et al, 2011). Individuals, in this case, will lean towards the information and expert positions that align with their existing beliefs and identification with their group. ...
Article
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This piece elaborates on a ‘new way of thinking’ (Einstein, 1946) that would contribute to overcoming the challenge of climate change and its impacts. This ‘new way’ will have us go beyond using facts and figures alone to persuade and cajole. It will have us stretching our moral imagination (Johnson, 2016) and empathising with people very different from ourselves. It will have us investing in processes of exchange which support the co-creation of knowledge and the future we want together.
... On the other hand, using a first-person (vs third-person) narrative style was related to higher connection ratings, but not authenticity (Saffran et al., 2020). Otherwise, the content of the message, such as high vs low risk, do not seem to affect expertise ratings (Kahan et al., 2011). Also probabilistic vs deterministic framing did not influence trust in scientists (Joslyn & Demnitz, 2019). ...
Article
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Communicating research findings to the public in a clear but engaging manner is challenging, yet central for maximizing their societal impact. This systematic review aimed to derive evidence-based strategies for science communication from experimental studies. Three databases were searched in December 2022. Experimental studies published in English or German were included if they tested the effect of providing written information about science to adults aged 16+ years by assessing the impact on at least one of four domains of science communication aims (understanding and knowledge, attitudes and trust, intention and behavior, engagement). A total of 171 publications were included. Derived strategies include avoiding jargon, carefully structuring texts, including citations and expert sources, being mindful about how and when to indicate conflict or uncertainty in science, using neutral language, and highlighting Open Science principles and replicability. They can be used to communicate science effectively to lay audiences, benefitting the society.
... Six items were adopted from the Individualism-Communitarianism sub-scale of the Cultural Cognition Worldview Scale (Kahan et al., 2011). Three items measured individualism (sample item: 'The government interferes far too much in our everyday lives', α = 0.79), and three measured collectivism (sample item: 'The government should do more to advance society's goals, even if that means limiting the freedom and choices of individuals', α = 0.72). ...
Article
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Governments have adopted unprecedented measures to assist in slowing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, but compliance varies among individuals. This UK study uses latent profile analysis to identify four classes of individuals on factors believed to influence compliance. Those who sought health information from authoritative sources and actively sought information from multiple sources were most compliant. Profile differences in compliance and vaccination status were also primarily driven by trust in healthcare institutions over trust in government. These findings contribute to understanding compliance profiles and emphasise the importance of authoritative information and trust in healthcare systems.
... Mientras que los enfoques de "comprobación de hechos" tienden a centrarse en la falsedad absoluta, el contenido hiperpartidista tiende a ser ciertamente más frecuente y es menos refutado, por lo que suele ser más accesible al "sentido común" social; aunque no siempre se puede discriminar claramente cuando la información es tendenciosa y cuando no. La polarización política en torno a cuestiones como la desinformación se produce no sólo a pesar de la falta de conexión lógica entre las creencias enfrentadas y los valores opuestos de quienes las defienden, sino que podría persistir a pesar del aparente consenso científico sobre las respuestas a muchas de estas cuestiones controvertidas (Kahan, Jenkins-Smith y Braman, 2011;Lewandowsky, Gignac y Vaughan, 2013). Incluso esto se agrava fuertemente cuando se difunden contenidos académicos que no cuentan con un consenso al respecto, atribuyéndose el principio de autoridad de la ciencia (como es el caso de las posiciones académicas respecto a los "beneficios sociales" del extractivismo) (Rikap et al., 2020). ...
Article
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Resumen Este manuscrito tiene como objetivo proporcionar elementos empíricos y teóricos de las ciencias cognitivas que estudian los fenómenos políticos, para reflexionar sobre las contradicciones que abrazan el concepto de "democracia" en el sistema capitalista actual. Si bien las discusiones desarrolladas aquí no se agotan en el caso local, se resaltará en caso de pertinencia las particulares argentinas en el proceso de polarización política y el incremento de sentimientos negativos en relación a los procesos electorales. Es importante alertar al lector de antemano de que no se encontrará con un texto canónico de Ciencias Sociales. Más bien intentará ser un diálogo interdisciplinar entre las neurociencias cognitivas, las ciencias políticas y la filosofía (entre otras disciplinas), y, con el aporte de varios campos teóricos relevantes, esbozar una dimensión cognitiva de los procesos complejos y multifactoriales que implican a las decisiones políticas. Palabras clave: decisiones políticas; polarización ideológica; fake news; efectos cognitivos. Abstract This manuscript aims to provide empirical and theoretical elements of the cognitive sciences that study political phenomena, to reflect on the contradictions that embrace the concept of "democracy" in the current capitalist system. Although the discussions developed here are not exhaustive in the local case, the particular Argentine issues in the process of political polarization and the increase in negative feelings in relation to electoral processes will be highlighted in case of relevance. It is important to alert the reader in advance that they will not encounter a canonical Social Sciences text. Rather, it will attempt to be an interdisciplinary dialogue between cognitive neurosciences, political sciences and philosophy (among other disciplines), and, with the contribution of several relevant theoretical fields, outline a cognitive dimension of the complex and multifactorial processes that involve decisions. policies.
... 4 To measure MPs' prior attitudes, I used a mean index of five items for the two health policy issues chosen: flu vaccination (FV) and colorectal cancer screening (CCS). The items cover individuals' risk perceptions of the illness (for example, 'The risks of colorectal cancer/ the flu are exaggerated'), as well as of the prevention method (that is, screening and vaccination, respectively), and of the effectiveness of the prevention method, beliefs about natural immunity, and concerns around commercial profiteering (Kahan et al, 2011;Golder et al, 2014;Martin and Petrie, 2017). For each item, MPs indicated how much they agreed or disagreed with the item (coded to range from one: 'completely disagree' to seven: 'completely agree'). ...
Article
Background Political scientists have repeatedly argued that politicians’ behaviour can be influenced by their beliefs about their constituents’ ability to hold them accountable. Yet, how such accountability beliefs affect politicians’ information processing or behaviour remains understudied. Aims and objectives I investigate how accountability beliefs influence information processing of members of parliament (MPs). I analyse whether MPs, who believe that their voters can hold them accountable, evaluate expertise in the news differently than their colleagues, who perceive less voter control. Method I rely on original data from a survey experiment carried out among 1,191 Swiss MPs. In the experiment, MPs evaluated expert statements in the news on health policy issues that varied regarding the source, the evidence base and the degree of advocacy. I then analyse how these evaluations vary, depending on MPs’ accountability beliefs. Findings Accountability beliefs indeed affect evaluations of expert credibility: MPs with strong accountability beliefs tend to be not only more sceptical about experts, who may be deemed biased (corporation experts), they also perceive experts advocating for specific policy solutions less negatively. However, contrary to expectations, MPs with strong accountability beliefs prefer experts using an opinion-based instead of an evidence-based language, at least on some issues. Discussion and conclusion This paper highlights the importance of accountability beliefs when seeking to understand how MPs evaluate and eventually use expertise in the news. However, it also suggests that these relationships warrant further investigation across different political issues and geopolitical contexts.
... We have thus presented an agentbased model of opinion formation based on social influence with the social identities of the agents driving their interactions and perceptions. In line with theoretical arguments about the importance of social identity [7,15,29,70,71] and with empirical studies indicating that identity may be a crucial driver of polarization [20,[72][73][74], opinion patterns in our model are crucially shaped by social identity. The model shows how ingroup bias can have different societal-level effects depending on the network structure. ...
Article
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Social influence aligns people’s opinions, but social identities and related in-group biases interfere with this alignment. For instance, the recent rise of young climate activists (e.g. ‘Fridays for Future’ or ‘Last Generation’) has highlighted the importance of generational identities in the climate change debate. It is unclear how social identities affect the emergence of opinion patterns, such as consensus or disagreement, in a society. Here, we present an agent-based model to explore this question. Agents communicate in a network and form opinions through social influence. The agents have fixed social identities which involve homophily in their interaction preferences and in-group bias in their perception of others. We find that the in-group bias has opposing effects depending on the network topology. The bias impedes consensus in highly random networks by promoting the formation of echo chambers within social identity groups. By contrast, the bias facilitates consensus in highly clustered networks by aligning dispersed in-group agents across the network and, thereby, preventing the formation of isolated echo chambers. Our model uncovers the mechanisms underpinning these opposing effects of the in-group bias and highlights the importance of the communication network topology for shaping opinion dynamics.
... As shown by Kunda (1990), people are often not motivated just to get the facts right. Instead, they are often (unconsciously) more motivated to arrive at particular conclusions that confirm their already held beliefs, attitudes, and values, and to protect their group identity (Flynn et al., 2017;Kahan, 2016;Kahan et al., 2011;Kraft et al., 2015;Taber & Lodge, 2013). This influences what information they expose themselves to (Stroud, 2011;Garrett, 2009;Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2009) and how information is processed and interpreted (Gaines et al., 2007;Glüer & Wikforss, 2022;Kunda, 1990;Nickerson, 1998). ...
... We know that beliefs in the causes and consequences of climate change can highlight the need for mitigation and adaptation policies more intensely than the belief in the mere existence of climate change, thereby raising the prospect of government intervention to cope with the effects of climate change 34 . In turn, this may trigger a negative reaction from highly individualistic people, who normally push back against big-government intrusion in their way of life 48 . These findings are consistent with new literature suggesting that climate skeptics are intuitively aware of the distinct dimensions of climate change beliefs, and have intentionally ceased to target belief in the existence of climate change (where scientific evidence is plentiful and increasingly hard to rebuke), questioning instead its human causes and the severity of its consequences 23,32 . ...
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The ability of climate skeptics to block climate action depends on prevailing beliefs among the public. Research in advanced democracies has shown skepticism about the existence, the causes, and the consequences of climate change to be associated with socio-demographic features and political ideology. Yet, little is known about climate-related beliefs elsewhere. We address this gap by mapping beliefs in climate change and their correlates in Latin America. We show skepticism over the existence and anthropogenic origins of climate change to be limited, but identify a high number of skeptics around the severity of its consequences. Furthermore, we show skepticism to be correlated with psychological rather than socio-political factors: individualistic worldviews in particular drive disbelief in the severe consequences of climate change, a worrying finding in contexts where social trust is low. These findings offer a starting point for better addressing the constraining effects of climate skepticism in the Global South.
... Conservatives and liberals, for instance, will evaluate claims concerning climate change in different ways depending on whether they threaten their group membership and preferred social order. 3 CCT therefore points to mechanisms of "identity-protective cognition" where individuals resist information that contradicts their preexisting political views and too easily accept content that reaffirms them (Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, and Braman 2011;Sherman and Cohen 2006). There are two components to identity-protective cognition. ...
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... Therefore, to the extent to which people reason in this way, they are prone to reject evidence which questions the values of the group they identify with. Kahan and his colleagues investigated this effect in the experiment which largely addresses polarization on climate change that was discussed in the first section of this paper (Kahan et al. 2011, Kahan 2016a. ...
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Since political polarization significantly impacts contemporary politics and democracy, much of the research in the social sciences is dedicated to this topic. In recent times, philosophers joined the discussion related to the research on political polarization, primarily in the fields of political philosophy and political epistemology. The main aim of this paper is philosophical analysis of some dominant explanations of political polarization, but also to propose solutions for a way out of political polarization from the perspective of political philosophy. In a nutshell, to find solutions for a way out of political polarization, I will be looking in the direction of boosting epistemic rationality and fostering communication in conditions of tolerance and equality.
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Objective Efforts to measure cultural identities in survey research rely on self‐reported ethnic, racial, and national identities. We test how survey operationalization of grid–group cultural theory (CT) influences the classification of individuals’ (sub)cultural identities. Methods A national online sample of Americans ( n = 697 for current analyses) rated items from CT indices, CT statements, and cultural cognition theory (CCT) indices in a 2016–2017 panel survey. Individuals were classified as identifying with a culture if they supported it (e.g., rating it above the scale mean or median, or in the top 35 percent of the scale distribution) or agreed with each item constituting the scale (the “midpoint method” introduced here). Results Different classification methods and cultural measures yield different proportions of support of cultural biases, yielding statistically significant differences despite most people being similarly classified. Survey measures can unequivocally assign a minority of people to a single cultural identity, with a majority so classified only if one does not require the individual to support only one bias. Conclusions Using a short, conceptually valid measure of culture with the novel midpoint method seems best for CT survey researchers but should have implications more broadly in cultural identity research and social science efforts to classify individuals.
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An investigation of the intricate link that exists between social media platforms and political polarisation is presented here. A comparative study is being conducted with the purpose of gaining an understanding of the ways in which the use of social media impacts political polarisation in various nations or areas. The objective of this study is to investigate the numerous processes that might lead to polarisation via the use of social media. These mechanisms include the echo chamber effect, algorithmic filtering, and the distribution of malicious information. Additionally, the research explores the function that social media has in the establishment of online communities, as well as the influence that it has on public debate and political beliefs. The purpose of this study is to give significant insights into the intricacies of this phenomena and its consequences for democratic societies. This is accomplished by examining the influence of social media on political polarisation in diverse circumstances.
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Bu çalışma Türkiye’deki aşı karşıtlığı sorununu çocuğun yüksek yararını merkeze alarak aşı karşıtı ebeveynlerin aşıya yönelik algılarını, ebeveynlerde aşı karşıtlığı fikrinin ortaya çıkışını ve yayılmasında etkili olan faktörlerin keşfedilmesini ve sosyal hizmet perspektifinde değerlendirilmesini amaçlamaktadır. Aşı karşıtlığı fikrinin ebeveynlerin çocuklara aşı takvimindeki aşıları bilinçli olarak yaptırmaması şeklinde tanımlanan ve basit görünen bir eylemden ziyade, aşılara yönelik endişeleri, güvensizlikleri, olumsuz deneyimleri, sağlıklı çocuk algısını, aşı yaptırmamasını etkileyen faktörlerini, bilgi kaynaklarını ve toplum sağlığını içeren çok boyutlu bir süreci ifade ettiği anlaşılmıştır. Bu çalışma Türkiye’de halk sağlığı alanında çocuğun üstün yararı ilkesini referans alarak aşı karşıtlığının sosyal hizmet perspektifinden incelenmesi adına yapılan ilk nitel sosyal hizmet araştırması olma niteliğini taşımaktadır.
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Trust in climate scientists is critical for public awareness and engagement in mitigating climate change. Previous research has shown that right-wing political ideology is associated with lower trust in climate scientists, yet the predominant focus on Western countries raises questions about the universality of this relationship. Addressing this gap in our preregistered study, we analyze cross-sectional, secondary data across 26 countries from all inhabited continents (N = 10,646). While observing generally high trust, right-leaning individuals reported lower trust in climate scientists compared to those further to the left. However, we find considerable differences in this association across countries, with Anglophone countries showing the strongest association. Contrary to popularly motivated reasoning accounts, education did not moderate this relationship. The findings highlight the consistency of the political ideology-trust in climate scientists relationship across 26 countries but also underscore overlooked variations outside Western contexts.
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Persuasive appeals frequently prove ineffective or produce unintended outcomes, due to the presence motivated reasoning. This research delves into the impact of emotional content levels, message valence, and the coherence of pre-existing attitudes on the process of biased information evaluation. By conducting a factorial survey ( N = 480) and incorporating a computational model of attitude formation, we aim to gain a deeper insight into the cognitive-affective mechanisms driving motivated reasoning. Our experimental findings reveal that motivated reasoning is most pronounced when persuasive appeals employ a combination of emotional and rational elements within a negatively valenced argumentation. Furthermore, our computational model, which estimates belief and affect adjustments underlying attitude changes, elucidates how message framing influences cognitive-affective processes through emotional coherence. The results provide support for a negative correlation between shifts in coherence in response to new information and the propensity for motivated reasoning. The research contributes to computational models of opinion dynamics and social influence, offering a psychologically realistic framework for exploring individual reasoning's impact on population-level dynamics, particularly in policy contexts, where it can enhance communication and informed policy discussions.
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This study investigated 3 broad classes of individual-differences variables (job-search motives, competencies, and constraints) as predictors of job-search intensity among 292 unemployed job seekers. Also assessed was the relationship between job-search intensity and reemployment success in a longitudinal context. Results show significant relationships between the predictors employment commitment, financial hardship, job-search self-efficacy, and motivation control and the outcome job-search intensity. Support was not found for a relationship between perceived job-search constraints and job-search intensity. Motivation control was highlighted as the only lagged predictor of job-search intensity over time for those who were continuously unemployed. Job-search intensity predicted Time 2 reemployment status for the sample as a whole, but not reemployment quality for those who found jobs over the study's duration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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In risk research, culture has been used mainly as a 'black box' of unknowns into which 'irregularities' of risk perceptions that could not be otherwise accounted for can be referred. In social anthropology it has been taken for granted that what is to be considered a 'risk' depends entirely on cultural settings and assumptions; risks are culturally defined and selected. This article takes a critical stance towards any such simplistic ideas about risk and culture. Culture is approached from a perspective of cognitive theory and is hence understood as shared schemata that define categories, relationships and contexts, making it possible to process meanings and order information. It is argued that if we are to succeed in investigating risk contextually, without ending up in a relativistic muddle which merely acknowledges myriads of diverse risk perceptions, it is necessary to problematize the assumed simplistic cultural nature of risk.
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How is public opinion towards nanotechnology likely to evolve? The ‘familiarity hypothesis’ holds that support for nanotechnology will likely grow as awareness of it expands. The basis of this conjecture is opinion polling, which finds that few members of the public claim to know much about nanotechnology, but that those who say they do are substantially more likely to believe its benefits outweigh its risks1, 2, 3, 4. Some researchers, however, have avoided endorsing the familiarity hypothesis, stressing that cognitive heuristics and biases could create anxiety as the public learns more about this novel science5, 6. We conducted an experimental study aimed at determining how members of the public would react to balanced information about nanotechnology risks and benefits. Finding no support for the familiarity hypothesis, the study instead yielded strong evidence that public attitudes are likely to be shaped by psychological dynamics associated with cultural cognition.
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People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner. They are apt to accept "confirming" evidence at face value while subjecting "disconfirming" evidence to critical evaluation, and, as a result, draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random empirical findings. Thus, the result of exposing contending factions in a social dispute to an identical body of relevant empirical evidence may be not a narrowing of disagreement but rather an increase in polarization. To test these assumptions, 48 undergraduates supporting and opposing capital punishment were exposed to 2 purported studies, one seemingly confirming and one seemingly disconfirming their existing beliefs about the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty. As predicted, both proponents and opponents of capital punishment rated those results and procedures that confirmed their own beliefs to be the more convincing and probative ones, and they reported corresponding shifts in their beliefs as the various results and procedures were presented. The net effect of such evaluations and opinion shifts was the postulated increase in attitude polarization. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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What dynamics shape public risk perceptions? What significance should such perceptions have in the formation of risk regulation? In Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (2005), Cass Sunstein catalogs a variety of cognitive and social mechanisms that he argues inflate public estimations of various societal risks. To counter the impact of irrational public fears, he advocates delegation of authority to politically insulated experts using economic cost-benefit analysis. Missing from Sunstein's impressive account, however, is any attention to the impact of cultural cognition, the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that reflect and reinforce their cultural worldviews. Relying on existing and original empirical research, we use this dynamic to develop an alternative cultural evaluator model, which better explains individual variation in risk perception, differences of opinions among experts, and the intensity of political conflict over risk than does Sunstein's irrational weigher model. Cultural cognition also complicates Sunstein's policy prescriptions. Because the public fears that Sunstein describes as irrational express cultural values, expert cost-benefit analysis does not merely insulate the law from factual error, as Sunstein argues; rather, it systematically detaches law from popular understandings of the ideal society. Indeed, the best defense of Sunstein's program might be just that: by eliding the role that risk regulation plays in endorsing contested cultural visions, expert cost-benefit analysis protects the law from a divisive and deeply illiberal form of expressive politics. The difficult task for those who understand the phenomenon of cultural cognition and who favor democratic modes of policymaking is to devise procedures that assure that popularly responsive risk regulation is both rational and respectful of diverse cultural worldviews.
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It was postulated that shared values determine social trust in institutions and persons related to a technology: One has trust in people holding similar salient values. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that social trust has a positive influence on perceived benefits and a negative impact on perceived risks. Results of a survey of University of Zürich students indicated that the proposed causal model explained perception of pesticides, nuclear power, and artificial sweetener very well. When social trust was controlled, the relation between risks and benefits perceived diminished. Results indicate that social trust is a key predictive factor of the perceived risks and benefits of a technology, and provide support for the salient values similarity theory of social trust.
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Why do white men fear various risks less than women and minorities? Known as the “white-male effect,” this pattern is well documented but poorly understood. This article proposes a new explanation: identity-protective cognition. Putting work on the cultural theory of risk together with work on motivated cognition in social psychology suggests that individuals selectively credit and dismiss asserted dangers in a manner supportive of their cultural identities. This dynamic, it is hypothesized, drives the white-male effect, which reflects the risk skepticism that hierarchical and individualistic white males display when activities integral to their cultural identities are challenged as harmful. The article presents the results of an 1,800-person study that confirmed that cultural worldviews interact with the impact of gender and race on risk perception in patterns that suggest cultural-identity-protective cognition. It also discusses the implications of these findings for risk regulation and communication.
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What explains controversy over outpatient commitment laws (OCLs), which authorize courts to order persons with mental illness to accept outpatient treatment? We hypothesized that attitudes toward OCLs reflect "cultural cognition" (DiMaggio, P. Annl Rev Sociol 23:263-287, 1997), which motivates individuals to conform their beliefs about policy-relevant facts to their cultural values. In a study involving a diverse sample of Americans (N = 1,496), we found that individuals who are hierarchical and communitarian tend to support OCLs, while those who are egalitarian and individualistic tend to oppose them. These relationships, moreover, fit the cultural cognition hypothesis: that is, rather than directly influencing OCL support, cultural values, mediated by affect, shaped individuals' perceptions of how effectively OCLs promote public health and safety. We discuss the implications for informed public deliberation over OCLs.
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Four studies demonstrated both the power of group influence in persuasion and people's blindness to it. Even under conditions of effortful processing, attitudes toward a social policy depended almost exclusively upon the stated position of one's political party. This effect overwhelmed the impact of both the policy's objective content and participants' ideological beliefs (Studies 1-3), and it was driven by a shift in the assumed factual qualities of the policy and in its perceived moral connotations (Study 4). Nevertheless, participants denied having been influenced by their political group, although they believed that other individuals, especially their ideological adversaries, would be so influenced. The underappreciated role of social identity in persuasion is discussed.
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Three studies link resistance to probative information and intransigence in negotiation to concerns of identity maintenance. Each shows that affirmations of personal integrity (vs. nonaffirmation or threat) can reduce resistance and intransigence but that this effect occurs only when individuals' partisan identity and/or identity-related convictions are made salient. Affirmation made participants' assessment of a report critical of U.S. foreign policy less dependent on their political views, but only when the identity relevance of the issue rather than the goal of rationality was salient (Study 1). Affirmation increased concession making in a negotiation over abortion policy, but again this effect was moderated by identity salience (Studies 2 and 3). Indeed, although affirmed negotiators proved relatively more open to compromise when either the salience of their true convictions or the importance of remaining faithful to those convictions was heightened, the reverse was true when the salient goal was compromise. The theoretical and applied significance of these findings are discussed.
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We propose a remedy for the discrepancy between the way political scientists analyze data with missing values and the recommendations of the statistics community. Methodologists and statisticians agree that "multiple imputation" is a superior approach to the problem of missing data scattered through one's explanatory and dependent variables than the methods currently used in applied data analysis. The reason for this discrepancy lies with the fact that the computational algorithms used to apply the best multiple imputation models have been slow, difficult to implement, impossible to run with existing commercial statistical packages, and demanding of considerable expertise. In this paper, we adapt an existing algorithm, and use it to implement a generalpurpose, multiple imputation model for missing data. This algorithm is considerably faster and easier to use than the leading method recommended in the statistics literature. We also quantify the risks of current missing data practices, ...
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Recent work in cognitive psychology and social cognition bears heavily on concerns of sociologists of culture. Cognitive research confirms views of culture as fragmented; clarifies the roles of institutions and agency; and illuminates supra-individual aspects of culture. Individuals experience culture as disparate bits of information and as schematic structures that organize that information. Culture carried by institutions, networks, and social movements diffuses, activates, and selects among available schemata. Implications for the study of identity, collective memory, social classification, and logics of action are developed.
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Cultural biases based on the anthropological work of Mary Douglas and her colleagues are compared to contemporary worldviews deriving from a psychological approach to the issues of risk and culture. It is argued that these orienting dispositions guide the perception of risk at both the collective and individual levels, with cultural biases referring to shared beliefs and values, and contemporary worldviews representing a person's way of responding to controversies over technology and society. Drawing on day-long assessments of 300 San Francisco Bay area citizens, it is shown that the cultural biases of Hierarchy, Individualism, and Egalitarianism are predictive of distinctive rankings of possible dangers and preferences for risk taking at the societal level. Findings on the relations among personality, political ideology, and orienting dispositions advance and clarify a research agenda linking individuals, social structures, and cultural biases.
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This paper re-examines the commonly observed inverse relationship between per- ceived risk and perceived benefit. We propose that this relationship occurs because people rely on aÄect when judging the risk and benefit of specific hazards. Evidence supporting this proposal is obtained in two experimental studies. Study 1 investigated the inverse relationship between risk and benefit judgments under a time-pressure condition designed to limit the use of analytic thought and enhance the reliance on aÄect. As expected, the inverse relationship was strengthened when time pressure was introduced. Study 2 tested and confirmed the hypothesis that providing information designed to alter the favorability of one's overall aÄective evaluation of an item (say nuclear power) would systematically change the risk and benefit judgments for that item. Both studies suggest that people seem prone to using an 'aÄect heuristic' which improves judgmental eÅciency by deriving both risk and benefit evaluations from a common source — aÄective reactions to the stimulus item. Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Social Scientists rarely take full advantage of the information available in their statistical results. As a consequence, they miss opportunities to present quantities that are of greatest substantive interest for their research and express the appropriate degree of certainty about these quantities. In this article, we offer an approach, built on the technique of statistical simulation, to extract the currently overlooked information from any statistical method and to interpret and present it in a reader-friendly manner. Using this technique requires some expertise, which we try to provide herein, but its application should make the results of quantitative articles more informative and transparent. To illustrate our recommendations, we replicate the results of several published works, showing in each case how the authors' own conclusions can be expressed more sharply and informatively, and, without changing any data or statistical assumptions, how our approach reveals important new information about the research questions at hand. We also offer very easy-to-use Clarify software that implements our suggestions.
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People often cling to beliefs even in the face of disconfirming evidence and interpret ambiguous information in a manner that bolsters strongly held attitudes. The authors tested a motivational account suggesting that these defensive reactions would be ameliorated by an affirmation of an alternative source of self-worth. Consistent with this interpretation, participants were more persuaded by evidence impugning their views toward capital punishment when they were self-affirmed than when they were not (Studies 1 and 2). Affirmed participants also proved more critical of an advocate whose arguments confirmed their views on abortion and less confident in their own attitudes regarding that issue than did unaffirmed participants (Study 3). Results suggest that assimilation bias and resistance to persuasion are mediated, in part, by identity-maintenance motivations.
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This work examines the basic social-psychological problems that generate the need for social trust and other acculturation strategies.
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Recent work in cognitive psychology and social cognition bears heavily on concerns of sociologists of culture. Cognitive research confirms views of culture as fragmented; clarifies the roles of institutions and agency; and illuminates supra-individual aspects of culture. Individuals experience culture as disparate bits of information and as schematic structures that organize that information. Culture carried by institutions, networks, and social movements diffuses, activates, and selects among available schemata. Implications for the study of identity, collective memory, social classification, and logics of action are developed.
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The purpose of this chapter is to set forth a very general approach to data analysis, using multiple regression, that has the flexibility of including all shapes and sizes of independent variables, just as they are studied in social psychology. These independent variables may be manipulated or measured, they may be continuous or discrete, and they may be within-Ss or between-Ss. Additionally, both their additive and interactive effects can be examined efficiently. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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What motivates individuals to support or oppose the legal regulation of guns? What sorts of evidence or arguments are likely to promote a resolution of the gun control debate? Using the survey methods associated with the cultural theory of risk, we demonstrate that individuals' positions on gun control derive from their cultural world views: individuals of an egalitarian or solidaristic orientation tend to support gun control, those of a hierarchical or individualist orientation to oppose it. Indeed, cultural orientations so defined are stronger predictors of individuals' positions than is any other fact about them, including whether they are male or female, white or black, Southerners or Easterners, urbanites or country dwellers, conservatives or liberals. The role of culture in determining attitudes towards guns suggests that econometric analyses of the effect of gun control on violent crime are unlikely to have much impact. As they do when they are evaluating empirical evidence of environmental and other types of risks, individuals can be expected to credit or dismiss empirical evidence on "gun control risks" depending on whether it coheres or conflicts with their cultural values. Rather than focus on quantifying the impact of gun control laws on crime, then, academics and others who want to contribute to resolving the gun debate should dedicate themselves to constructing a new expressive idiom that will allow citizens to debate the cultural issues that divide them in an open and constructive way.
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What is the relationship among fear, danger, and the law? There are serious problems with the increasingly influential Precautionary Principle - the idea that regulators should take steps to protect against potential harms, even if causal chains are uncertain and even if we do not know that harms are likely to come to fruition. An investigation of such problems as global warming, terrorism, DDT, and genetic engineering shows that the Precautionary Principle is incoherent. Risks exist on all sides of social situations, and precautionary steps create dangers of their own. The idea of precaution seems operational only because diverse cultures focus on very different risks, with social influences and peer pressures accentuating some fears and reduce others. Cascades, the availability heuristic, loss aversion, and group polarization are highly relevant here. Instead of adopting the Precautionary Principle, regulators should take three steps: they should adopt a narrow Anti-Catastrophe Principle, designed for the most serious risks; pay close attention to costs and benefits; and accept an approach called "libertarian paternalism," designed to respect freedom of choice while also moving people in directions that will make their lives go better. An understanding of the dynamics of fear also shows how free societies can protect liberty amidst fears about terrorism and national security.
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This chapter provides an overview of self-affirmation theory. Self-affirmation theory asserts that the overall goal of the self-system is to protect an image of its self-integrity, of its moral and adaptive adequacy. When this image of self-integrity is threatened, people respond in such a way as to restore self-worth. The chapter illustrates how self-affirmation affects not only people's cognitive responses to threatening information and events, but also their physiological adaptations and actual behavior. It examines the ways in which self-affirmations reduce threats to the self at the collective level, such as when people confront threatening information about their groups. It reviews factors that qualify or limit the effectiveness of self-affirmations, including situations where affirmations backfire, and lead to greater defensiveness and discrimination. The chapter discusses the connection of self-affirmations theory to other motivational theories of self-defense and reviews relevant theoretical and empirical advances. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of self-affirmations theory for interpersonal relationships and coping.
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Ample psychological evidence suggests that people’s learning behavior is often prone to a “myside bias” or “irrational belief persistence” in contrast to learning behavior exclusively based on objective data. In the context of Bayesian learning such a bias may result in diverging posterior beliefs and attitude polarization even if agents receive identical information. Such patterns cannot be explained by the standard model of rational Bayesian learning that implies convergent beliefs. Based on Choquet expected utility theory, we therefore develop formal models of Bayesian learning with psychological bias as alternatives to rational Bayesian learning. We derive conditions under which beliefs may diverge in the learning process despite the fact that all agents observe the same sample drawn from an i.i.d. process. Key to our approach is the description of ambiguous beliefs as neo-additive capacities (Chateauneuf et al., J Econ Theory 137:538–567, 2007), which allows for a flexible and parsimonious parametrization of departures from additive probability measures.
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This paper explores a judgmental heuristic in which a person evaluates the frequency of classes or the probability of events by availability, i.e., by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind. In general, availability is correlated with ecological frequency, but it is also affected by other factors. Consequently, the reliance on the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases. Such biases are demonstrated in the judged frequency of classes of words, of combinatorial outcomes, and of repeated events. The phenomenon of illusory correlation is explained as an availability bias. The effects of the availability of incidents and scenarios on subjective probability are discussed.
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Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models, first published in 2007, is a comprehensive manual for the applied researcher who wants to perform data analysis using linear and nonlinear regression and multilevel models. The book introduces a wide variety of models, whilst at the same time instructing the reader in how to fit these models using available software packages. The book illustrates the concepts by working through scores of real data examples that have arisen from the authors' own applied research, with programming codes provided for each one. Topics covered include causal inference, including regression, poststratification, matching, regression discontinuity, and instrumental variables, as well as multilevel logistic regression and missing-data imputation. Practical tips regarding building, fitting, and understanding are provided throughout.
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Introduction General Conditions for the Randomization-Validity of Infinite-m Repeated-Imputation Inferences Examples of Proper and Improper Imputation Methods in a Simple Case with Ignorable Nonresponse Further Discussion of Proper Imputation Methods The Asymptotic Distribution of (Q̄m, Ūm, Bm) for Proper Imputation Methods Evaluations of Finite-m Inferences with Scalar Estimands Evaluation of Significance Levels from the Moment-Based Statistics Dm and Δm with Multicomponent Estimands Evaluation of Significance Levels Based on Repeated Significance Levels
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Narratives are increasingly subject to empirical study in a wide variety of disciplines. However, in public policy narratives are thought of almost exclusively as a post-structural concept outside the realm of empirical study. In this paper, after reviewing the major literature on narratives, we argue that policy narratives can be studied using systematic empirical approaches and introduce a "Narrative Policy Framework" (NPF) for elaboration and empirical testing. The NPF defines narrative structure and narrative content. We then discuss narrative at the micro-level of analysis and examine how narratives impact individual attitudes and hence aggregate public opinion. Similarly, we examine strategies for the studying of group and elite behavior using NPF. We conclude with seven hypotheses for researchers interested in elaborating the framework.
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There is a culture war in America over science. Why? And what should be done to promote the ability of culturally diverse citizens to agree on how science can inform their common interests in health, security, and prosperity? This article uses the findings of Cultural Cognition Project studies to address these question.
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To study the homogeneity and influences on scientists' perspectives of environmental risks, we have examined similarities and differences in risk perceptions, particularly regarding nuclear wastes, and policy preferences among 1011 scientists and engineers. We found significant differences (p < 0.05) in the patterns of beliefs among scientists from different fields of research. In contrast to physicists, chemists, and engineers, life scientists tend to: (a) perceive the greatest risks from nuclear energy and nuclear waste management; (b) perceive higher levels of overall environmental risk; (c) strongly oppose imposing risks on unconsenting individuals; and (d) prefer stronger requirements for environmental management. On some issues related to priorities among public problems and calls for government action, there are significant variations among life scientists or physical scientists. We also found that--independently of field of research--perceptions of risk and its correlates are significantly associated with the type of institution in which the scientist is employed. Scientists in universities or state and local governments tend to see the risks of nuclear energy and wastes as greater than scientists who work as business consultants, for federal organizations, or for private research laboratories. Significant differences also are found in priority given to environmental risks, the perceived proximity of environmental disaster, willingness to impose risks on an unconsenting population, and the necessity of accepting risks and sacrifices.
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This paper seeks to compare two frameworks which have been proposed to explain risk perceptions, namely, cultural theory and the psychometric paradigm. A structured questionnaire which incorporated elements from both approaches was administered to 129 residents of Norwich, England. The qualitative risk characteristics generated by the psychometric paradigm explained a far greater proportion of the variance in risk perceptions than cultural biases, though it should be borne in mind that the qualitative characteristics refer directly to risks whereas cultural biases are much more distant variables. Correlations between cultural biases and risk perceptions were very low, but the key point was that each cultural bias was associated with concern about distinct types of risks and that the pattern of responses was compatible with that predicted by cultural theory. The cultural approach also provided indicators for underlying beliefs regarding trust and the environment; beliefs which were consistent within each world view but divergent between them. An important drawback, however, was that the psychometric questionnaire could only allocate 32% of the respondents unequivocally to one of the four cultural types. The rest of the sample expressed several cultural biases simultaneously, or none at all. Cultural biases are therefore probably best interpreted as four extreme world views, and a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies would generate better insights into who might defend these views in what circumstances, whether there are only four mutually exclusive world views or not, and how these views are related to patterns of social solidarity, and judgments on institutional trust.
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Research has shown that people prefer supporting to conflicting information when making decisions. Whether this biased information search also occurs in group decision making was examined in three experiments. Experiment 1 indicated that groups as well as individuals prefer supporting information and that the strength of this bias depends on the distribution of the group members' initial decision preferences. The more group members had chosen the same alternative prior to the group discussion (group homogeneity), the more strongly the group preferred information supporting that alternative. Experiment 2 replicated these results with managers. Experiment 3 showed that the differences between homogeneous and heterogeneous groups reflect group-level processes. Higher commitment and confidence in homogeneous groups mediated this effect. Functional and dysfunctional aspects of biased information seeking in group decision making are discussed.
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Introductory statistics classes teach us that we can never prove the null hypothesis; all we can do is reject or fail to reject it. However, there are times when it is necessary to try to prove the nonexistence of a difference between groups. This most often happens within the context of comparing a new treatment against an established one and showing that the new intervention is not inferior to the standard. This article first outlines the logic of "noninferiority" testing by differentiating between the null hypothesis (that which we are trying to nullify) and the "nill" hypothesis (there is no difference), reversing the role of the null and alternate hypotheses, and defining an interval within which groups are said to be equivalent. We then work through an example and show how to calculate sample sizes for noninferiority studies.
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A study (N=198) was conducted to examine hypotheses derived from an emotion-based model of stigma responses to radiation sources. A model of stigma susceptibility is proposed in which affective reactions and cognitive worldviews activate predispositions to appraise and experience events in systematic ways that result in the generation of negative emotion, risk perceptions, and stigma responses. Results of structural equation modeling supported the hypotheses. Radiation sources that scored higher on a measure of stigma were included in the analyses (i.e., nuclear power plants, radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, radiation from nuclear weapons testing). Individual differences in negative reactivity and worldviews were associated with the strength of emotional appraisals that were associated, in turn, with negative emotion toward stigmatized radiation sources. As hypothesized, the model fit better with perceived risk as a function of negative emotion rather than vice versa. Finally, a measure of stigma was associated with negative emotion and, to a lesser extent, with risk perceptions. Risk communication about stigmatized objects may benefit from a more complete understanding of how affective and emotional reactions are constructed and the routes through which they affect responses and behaviors.
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The Department of Energy's program for disposing of high-level radioactive wastes has been impeded by overwhelming political opposition fueled by public perceptions of risk. Analysis of these perceptions shows them to be deeply rooted in images of fear and dread that have been present since the discovery of radioactivity. The development and use of nuclear weapons linked these images to reality and the mishandling of radioactive wastes from the nation's military weapons facilities has contributed toward creating a profound state of distrust that cannot be erased quickly or easily. Postponing the permanent repository and employing dry-cask storage of wastes on site would provide the time necessary for difficult social and political issues to be resolved.
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Psychological research indicates that people have a cognitive bias that leads them to misinterpret new information as supporting previously held hypotheses. We show in a simple model that such confirmatory bias induces overconfidence: given any probabilistic assessment by an agent that one of two hypotheses is true, the appropriate beliefs would deem it less likely to be true. Indeed, the hypothesis that the agent believes in may be more likely to be wrong than right. We also show that the agent may come to believe with near certainty in a false hypothesis despite receiving an infinite amount of information.