How Policy Solutions (Constructively) Beget Problems

Most policymakers think linearly: identify a problem, then devise a solution. But a phenomenon known as “cultural cognition” essentially stands this approach on its head. First devise a policy solution, one that affirms all cultural worldviews simultaneously, because it's only then that one can expect persons of diverse cultural persuasions to come to the shared belief that there is a problem worth addressing.

Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of persons to conform their view of risks and other policy-relevant facts to their cultural values. People do this, in part, to minimize cognitive dissonance: it’s much more pleasant to believe that what’s morally worthy is also benign, and what’s base dangerous, than vice versa (see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966) on this). People also tend to form factual beliefs that line up with their cultural values because of the culturally partisan foundations of trust. Confronted with competing claims about what activities are dangerous and what policies will abate those dangers, people naturally tend to take the word of those who share their cultural values.

In these circumstances, risk attitudes are likely to be driven by a kind of cultural-identity self-defense mechanism. Because guns are integral to valued social roles within their way of life, for example, relatively hierarchical and individualistic persons (particularly hierarchical and individualistic males) are likely to react skeptically to the idea that weak gun control laws promote crime and result in gun accidents. Egalitarian and solidaristic persons are drawn to the idea that commerce and industry threatens the environment in part because that conclusion justifies regulating activities their values condemn as entrenching inequality and valorizing unconstrained self-interest.

None of this is to deny that there is a truth of the matter about the risks posed (or not posed) by guns, by industrial pollution, and by myriad other activities the dangerousness of which is a point of cultural contention. But the phenomenon of cultural cognition does imply that the simple discovery and dissemination of truth cannot be expected to generate consensus on what societal risks are real and how they should be ameliorated. In order for the truth to be commonly accepted, it must be presented in a form, or under circumstances, that dissipates the threat it poses to certain groups’ cultural identities.

This is the nerve of a brilliant body of research conducted by social psychologist Geoff Cohen and his collaborators. See G. L. Cohen, J. Aronson & C. M. Steele, When beliefs Yield to Evidence: Reducing Biased Evaluation by Affirming the Self, 26 Personality & Social Psych. Bull. 1151 (2000). Cohen et al. show that individuals are much more willing to accept information that threatens a strongly held political value (e.g., opposition to the death penalty or opposition to abortion) shortly after some self-affirming experience -- e.g., doing well on a particular kind of test or being made aware that they possess traits that others respect. The mechanism behind this effect is that such affirmation buffers the threat to self that individuals would otherwise experience as they contemplated revising an opinion that they hold in common with others with whom they share a strong group identity.

There is a political analog of the Cohen self-affirmation effect. It involves affirming the selves of those who might resist information about a societal danger not by timing such information to arrive immediately after a personally affirming experience (that would be a neat trick!) but rather by tying that information to a proposed policy solution that itself affirms the resisters’ cultural values.

For a historical example, consider the softening of conservative opposition to air pollution regulation in the early 1990s. Individualists tend to resist the idea that commerce threatens the environment, because that conclusion would imply that society ought to constrain market behavior and like forms of private ordering. Yet when the idea of tradable emission permits ¾ a market solution to the problem of air pollution -- was devised, the conservative and highly individualist Bush I Administration stopped resisting. Shown a solution that affirmed their cultural values, it became less costly -- in cultural-status-threat terms -- for individualists to accept the idea that there was a problem to be dealt with after all.

For a contemporary example, consider the global warming controversy. Again, individualists -- because they see it as threatening the autonomy of markets -- and hierarchists -- because they see it as impugning the competence of social and governmental elites -- are very skeptical of the idea that global warming is a serious threat. (This is one of the findings of the National Risk & Culture Survey, which I and a number of other scholars conducted.)

But recently, certain groups -- conservative and liberal, it turns out -- have started to tout renewed investment in nuclear power as a way to reduce the fossil fuel greenhouse-gas emissions primarily responsible for global warming. The Cohen self-affirmation effect suggests why this strategy might work. Individualists and hierarchists both support nuclear power, which is emblematic of the very cultural values that are threatened by society’s recognition of the global warming threat. Shown a solution, then, that affirms their identities, individualists and hierarchists can be expected to display less resistance -- not just politically, but cognitively -- to the proposition that global warming is a problem after all.

Indeed, when egalitarians and solidarists are exposed to the such information, they are likely to perceive nuclear power to be less dangerous. The affirmation of their identity associated with the recognition of global warming as a serious threat lowers the cost -- in a cultural status sense -- of accepting information that they have long resisted too.

Will the proposal of “nuclear cooling” generate the same convergence of risk perception about global warming that tradable emissions did on perception of air pollution? Members of the Cultural Cognition Project are currently investigating this and related questions in a set of experiments aimed at identifying the mechanisms of cultural cognition.

But this much is clear already: because culture is cognitively prior to fact, culture must be prior to fact politically as well. To promote sensible democratic responses to risk, policymakers need to be just as sophisticated about the cultural values that laws express as they are about the costs and benefits they impose.