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In Cultural Cognition and Public Policy, Dan Kahan and Donald Braman outline their theory of what explains persistent public disagreement over the effects of public policies and certain controversial legal issues, such as gun control, abortion, and the death penalty. (Terrorism should be added to that list.) While there are several influential theories of social constructivism (Kant, Hegel, von Glasersfeld, von Foerster, Berger/Luckman, Luhmann, Willke), few have been tested empirically. Kahan and Braman (in the context of the Cultural Cognition Project) have undertaken that task. Their central claim is that values determine not only our normative attitudes but also the factual universe that is available to us. In other words, as facts are dependent on value orientations, culture is cognitively prior to facts. (That should not come as a surprise to anyone who had been following the last presidential election, where suddenly there were not only red and blue states in terms of social values but also, and as a consequence, red and blue facts.) Kahan and Braman locate cultural world-views within a two-dimensional grid.

On the x-axis are group values, ranging from individualism to collectivism, and on the y-axis are attitudes toward criteria for distribution. Hierarchical societies rely on conspicuous and socially fixed criteria (race, gender, heritage, etc.), whereas egalitarian societies deny that such criteria should be employed. For ease of reference, I assigned four political archetypes to the grid: conservative, libertarian, liberal (= social-democrat, for our non-U.S. readers), and fascist. Kahan and Braman found that

cultural worldviews more powerfully predicted individual beliefs about the seriousness of [global warming, nuclear power, and pollution generally] than any other factor, including gender, race, income, education, and political ideology. (Id., at 13).

It would indeed be a spectacular confirmation of social constructivism if that claim could be verified across a broad range of topics. As indicated in the chart above, beliefs about many contentious policy issues come in familiar clusters. On that basis, Kahan and Braman conclude that the “end of ideology thesis” (that is, most people are rather moderate in their views, as the pragmatic struggle to improve one’s lot trumps principled political affiliations) is wrong. But the “culture war” thesis, while certainly somewhat closer to the mark, is also inadequate because it misunderstands the manner in which culture affects our attitudes toward questions of public policy. Cultural world-views don’t motivate by themselves as most of us are not cultural internalists, rather, they orient (or bias) our process of selecting those who we accept as authorities for the truth of factual propositions. This is because ordinary citizens

lack the capacity to decide for themselves whose [scientific study] has merit. They have no choice but to defer to those whom they trust to tell them which scientists to believe. And the people they trust are inevitably the ones whose cultural values they share, and who are inclined to credit or dismiss scientific evidence based on its conformity to their cultural priors. (Id., at 24).

In other words, because of the cultural biases woven into our engines of perception and world-construction, conclusively establishing the truth of a proposition within the scientific system does not necessarily end policy debates, as demonstrated by the continuing debate (in the U.S.) over one of the most secure elements in all of human knowledge, the theory of evolution. It would be fascinating to see how Kahan’s and Braman’s data relate to the work of the world values survey that maps cultural world-views on a much broader scale within a framework of survival- and self-expression values.

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