The Gun Debate: Impervious to Fact, but Not Insusceptible of Resolution

Dan Kahan

Can individuals be expected to change their mind in the gun control debate? Perhaps, but definitely not as a result of empirical evidence relating to the supposed efficacy or inefficacy of various forms of gun control. This is one of the conclusions supported by data collected in the National Risk Culture Survey.

The basic hypothesis investigated by the Survey was that individuals adapt their perceptions of risks to their values. To avoid cognitive dissonance, most of us are predisposed to believe that morally worthwhile behavior is benign, and morally objectionable behavior dangerous. In addition, most of us aren’t in a position to gather empirical data, or to evaluate the empirical studies conducted by others, on whether global warming is a serious threat, whether being operated on by an HIV-positive surgeon presents a serious risk of HIV infection, whether obtaining an abortion poses a serious threat to the health of women, etc. Instead we must rely on the word of those whom we trust. The people we trust, not surprisingly, are the ones who share our basic cultural values and who are likely to be disposed to accept one set of factual claims or another to avoid cognitive dissonance. Put all these dynamics together, and we should expect to see cultural polarization on various societal and personal risk issues. And that’s exactly what we found in the National Risk Culture Survey.

One of the issues on which we found such a pattern was "gun risks." The gun control debate is naturally framed as one between competing risk perceptions: that too little gun control risks a world pervaded by gun violence and accidents versus the risk that too much gun control risks a world in which the law-abiding are unable to defend themselves from violent criminals. Which one of these risks individuals take more seriously, we found, is strongly predicted by their cultural worldviews: persons of an egalitarian or solidaristic worldview worry more about gun crime and accidents, persons of an hierarchic or individualistic worldview worry more about defenselessness. These conflicting gun-risk perceptions correspond to the positive and negative social meanings that guns bear across these competing cultural ways of life.

The survey collected information on a host of different sorts of gun attitudes. We collected information not only on our respondents’ attitudes toward competing gun risks, but also their beliefs about gun control laws and the value they attach or antipathy they experience toward guns for essentially cultural reasons.

We found, not surprisingly, that these various sorts of attitudes tend to be strongly correlated. That is, if someone has a positive cultural evaluation of guns, he or she very likely thinks guns aren’t dangerous, and that gun control increases rather than reduces crime; in contrast, if a person has a negative cultural evaluation of guns, he or she likely thinks guns are dangerous, and that gun control would reduce rather than increase crime. This strong clustering of views is consistent with the idea that individuals conform their factual beliefs about risk and risk-regulation to their cultural appraisals of the activities subject to regulation.

Nevertheless, it’s still possible to try to figure out what matters more to people facts or values. Although people generally believe that gun control works or doesn’t depending on whether they are culturally disposed to dislike or like guns, we can simply ask them: would you change your position on gun control if, contrary to your existing views, evidence were produced that showed stricter gun control would make society more safe or less?

Our Survey did that, and we found, unambiguously, that for the vast majority of Americans, cultural values trump gun-control facts. Overall, about 59% of the respondents in our 1600-person nationwide sample agreed, and 39% disagreed, that American society needs “stronger gun control laws.” Of the persons who indicated they favor more gun control, 79% expressed agreement with this statement: “[e]ven if the widespread ownership of guns greatly reduced crime, I wouldn’t want to live in a society where lots of people armed themselves for self-protection.” Of the persons who indicated that they oppose more gun control, 87% agreed with this statement: “[e]ven if banning handguns would greatly reduce crime, it would be wrong for society to forbid law-abiding people from owning guns for self-protection.”

The bottom line seems clear: more facts on guns won’t generate consensus on whether and how to regulate private weapons possession.

But does that mean that the prospects for overcoming societal dissenus on gun control are essentially nil? We don’t think so.

Return to the finding that all individual gun attitudes tend strongly to cohere: that is, if they have a positive cultural attitude toward guns, they tend to believe guns are safe and gun control inefficacious, whereas if they have a negative cultural attitude toward guns they tend to believe guns are dangerous and gun control effective. Individuals have “global gun attitudes” that are largely cultural in origin. That gun attitudes are “global” and “cultural” in this sense implies that that individuals could be expected to change their views, and that individuals of diverse cultural orientations could in fact be expected to converge in their factual beliefs and overall attitudes, if doing so could be made compatible with their basic cultural commitments.

The results of the National Risk Culture Survey imply that conflict over guns is, at bottom, an artifact of a type of cultural status anxiety. Persons naturally identify strongly with the their cultural values and with those who share them. When a societal conflict seems to pit the values of their cultural group against those of another, individuals instinctively adopt a defensive posture, blocking out messages that they believe emanate from or ultimately bolster the position of their cultural adversaries. That’s what’s happening on guns, on environmental protection, and a host of other issues.

But there’s nothing immutable about the cultural valences that particular policy outcomes bear. On the contrary, through the appropriate expressive framing of policies, and the appropriate selection of culturally authoritative policy advocates, a variety of policies can be constructed that are appealing simultaneously to persons of diverse cultural orientations. In the resulting climate of trust that emerges, groups of diverse orientation can in fact be expected to become receptive to factual information relevant to improving their common welfare. This expressively pluralistic form of democratic deliberations has worked on various issues fraught with cultural conflict, and it can work on guns.

At this point, I’m sure you are impatient for specifics. You can find some in our working paper, Overcoming the Fear of Cultural Politics: Constructing a Better Gun Debate. Other papers downloadable from the Cultural Cognition Project site can also give you a more complete picture of the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of this argument.

But if you are looking for a simple take-away message, it’s this: in the American gun debate, as in a host of other risk regulatory disputes, culture is prior to fact, both cognitively and politically.