Sammy's Dot

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.

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