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book interview conservatism republicans motivated-cognition cognition psychology social-psychology denial

"I have found that no amount of facts or evidence will shift an “ostrich” republican back to the old ways of Goldwater and Buckley, in pre-Fox days, when conservatism respected knowledge and facts. Back when the average education level of republicans was higher than democrats, when 40% of scientists were in the GOP, instead of less than 5% today. When knowledge and intellect weren't the openly declared enemy.

Nevertheless, I found a bullet! When faced with absolute denial and perfect assertion-addiction, one thing cracks the turtle shell. Demanding a wager!"

denial republicans conservatism betting wager motivated-cognition

"My guest was Yale’s Dan Kahan, who was also on the show a year earlier, discussing his cultural cognition model. This is a very powerful and increasingly influential account of how different ideological groups–hierarchs, individualists, egalitarians, communitarians–are biased towards rejecting science on particular topics that are, shall we say, in their emotionally defensive “zones.”

Kahan ascribes this to motivated reasoning--e.g., our preexisting emotional commitments, or group commitments, skew our reading of evidence (scientific or otherwise) and lead us to elaborately defend our prior commitments. And because hierarchical-individualists have a very different vision of the “good” society and how it is organized than do egalitarian-communitarians, they accordingly reason very differently about scientific issues that threaten their values (like global warming) than do those on the other side."

politics psychology motivated-cognition reasoning group cognition bias

"In any case, while I agree that everybody has biases, I’m not sure that means I must also agree that everybody is equally biased. To butcher George Orwell, why couldn’t it be the case that all humans are biased, but are some humans are more biased than others?"

climate-change global-warming denial conservative gender race motivated-cognition system ideology justification social-dominance bias

"They’re the conservative white men (CWM) of climate change denial, and we’ve all gotten to know them in one way or another. But we haven’t had population-level statistics on them until recently, courtesy of a new paper in Global Environmental Change (apparently not online yet, but live in the blogosphere as of late last week) by sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap. It’s entitled “Cool Dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States.” Among other data, McCright and Dunlap show the following:

— 14% of the general public doesn’t worry about climate change at all, but among CWMs the percentage jumps to 39%.

— 32% of adults deny there is a scientific consensus on climate change, but 59% of CWMs deny what the overwhelming majority of the world’s scientists have said.

— 3 adults in 10 don’t believe recent global temperature increases are primarily caused by human activity. Twice that many – 6 CWMs out of every ten – feel that way. "

climate-change global-warming denial conservative gender race motivated-cognition system ideology justification social-dominance

The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities.

academic-center law school(Yale) cognition culture motivated-cognition science perception bias psychology