Cultural orientation: a psychological blinder
I’m going to venture a wild guess, here: if you’re a psychologist, or a psychology student, terms like collectivist and individualist are very, very familiar. (So familiar you may be sick of hearing about the explanatory power of these concepts. So familiar that it seems like everything is being divided up into these two categories.) If you’re not into psychology, you can probably still make an accurate stab at what the two terms mean, but might not guess that they actually do seem to be useful ways to categorize (and explain!) our values and beliefs and behaviours. Since I was a psychology student, and I’m very interested in why different people behave in different ways when it comes to environmental problems, I was really fascinated to hear about the work that Donald Braman has been doing, along with Dan Kahan and a number of colleagues. (Kahan looks to be the principal investigator and I’m citing it as such, but I first heard of it listening to an interview with Braman in the course of an Ideas podcast.)
Their paper on the results of the Second National Risk and Culture Study, publicly available (in PDF format) from The Social Science Research Network, reviews several areas of public policy in which people’s willingness to accept seemingly objective facts turned out to be strongly associated with their cultural orientation.
As I noted at the beginning, measures of cultural orientation are widely used in psychology now, and there is a great deal of experimental evidence to support their use. In these studies, generally survey types, the investigators used two scales: individualism and communitarianism, and egalitarianism and hierarchism. Although it is not discussed in this paper, in my (limited) experience with this type of research, participants answer a range of standardized questions to determine where they fit on these axes. (It would have been useful if the researchers had included information on which measures they used, but they do provide a reference in the appendix.)
So, on to the meat of the study: Kahan et al. looked at a number of areas in which perception of risk was dependent on cultural orientation, including gun control, mandatory HPV vaccination, nanotechnology, and global warming. I learned about this study while listening to a podcast on the possible geopolitical effects of climate change, and given my interests, this was the section that really got me excited (though it’s all fascinating).
The investigators had their participants read a newspaper article discussing climate change, but the article came in two versions. In both, the article presented the same facts in the same way: climate change is occuring due to human use of fossil fuels, and will lead to serious consequences for human life it is not reversed. However, while in one, the “scientist’s” report stated that stronger anti-pollution regulations were needed to reduce fossil fuel emissions, while in the other, the recommendation was for further deregulation of, and private investment in, the nuclear industry.
The results were marked: the participants identitified as individualists and hierarchs were significantly more likely to accept the facts presented about climate change, and the implied degree of risk, if they read the pro-nuclear rather than the anti-pollution article – and if they read the anti-pollution article, they actually rated the risk of climate change as less than than if they had read no article at all. On the other hand, though the effect was less, the communitarians and egalitarians actually rated the risk from climate change as lower if they read the pro-nuclear article.The regression analysis suggests that where people fall on these scales explains far more of the variance in answers than do factors such as education and age.
If I’d been running this study, I would have liked to include a second control group in addition to the “no-article” group: I’d include a third article which presented findings about climate change, but did not make any policy recommendations. In this study, participants were either given information plus recommendations that may or may not have been in accord with their cultural orientation, or they were given no information at all. While I would hope that everybody has some idea of what climate change is and what it entails, I wouldn’t assume it’s true, and I think that this might have made a difference in the results.
However, the study still suggests that for those of us who want to develop policies that respond to climate change, it’s going to be a hard slog if facts are shut out based on cultural biases. I’ve already suggested that I think education without policy recommendations might help to get people thinking about climate change risks without setting off the cultural polarization effect described by Kahan et al. (That might come down to another one of my major hobby horses: decent science education. Mandatory. For everyone. All through high school. With required summer sessions for science teachers to update their knowledge. What’s with this crap where two high school general level science courses is all you need?) In addition, I think that policy-makers need to be willing to accept a broad range of options for dealing with climate change. I personally think that regulation and pricing are both going to be needed, but I also believe in robust democracy, and I think that as much as possible, individuals should be empowered to make their own decisions about their lives. There has be a happy medium between those two points.
And, as Kahan et al. note, depending on how the issues are presented, it’s possible to head off the polarizing reactions, and that lets people make decisions a little more objectively. That’s something that’s tough, but possible – and those of us who do accept that climate change is a fact that requires action now are going to have to remember it when we try to be persuasive.
