Cultural Cognition

We only believe what we want to believe. This statement makes sense and it's easy to think it applies to others but not to ourselves. I recently discovered that sociologists and others have begun investigating and quantifying the effects of what is known as the cultural cognition of risk. Some of these researchers are affiliated with the Cultural Cognition Project at the Yale Law School. Here is an excerpt from their home page (http://www.culturalcognition.net/):

The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities. Project members are using the methods of various disciplines -- including social psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science -- to chart the impact of this phenomenon and to identify the mechanisms through which it operates. The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify processes of democratic decisionmaking by which society can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks and consistent with sound public policymaking.

One of their findings suggests that when given information regarding a risk or decision, we tend to side with the presenter most like ourselves. This makes sense and we should have always expected as much. I suspect that no one is immune to the tendency of siding with whomever appears to share our beliefs or with whatever information already fits our accepted paradigm. The moral of this story is we should learn to better question our own motives when assimilating information and assessing risk.

Update: After reading my post again I realize it doesn't quite say what I wanted. Researchers at CCP have found that when different presenters provide identical information, we are more or less likely to accept the information based on how well we identify with the presenter. Ethos trumps logos. That's a bit disturbing to think about. Appealing to ethos is a rhetorical technique that dates back to ancient Greece, so the importance of ethos in argument has been understood, in part, for many centuries.