Climate Change and Cultural Cognition

Abstract

How should we form beliefs concerning global climate change? For most of us, directly evaluating the evidence isn’t feasible; we lack expertise. So, any rational beliefs we form will have to be based in part on deference to those who have it. But in this domain, questions about how to identify experts can be fraught. This chapter discusses a partial answer to the question of how we in fact identify experts: Dan Kahan’s cultural cognition thesis, according to which we treat experts on factual questions of political import only insofar as they share our moral and cultural values. The chapter then poses some normative questions about cultural cognition: is it a species of irrationality that must be overcome if we are to communicate scientific results effectively, or is it instead an inescapable part of rational belief management? Ultimately, it is argued that cultural cognition is substantively unreasonable, though not formally irrational.

Pediatric Diabetes Technology Management: Italian Health Care Workers' Point of View

“…The transcriptions were collected in two small corpus, one for DIAB (token= 5292) and one for PSY (token=8391). To explore the emotional representation of these two groups of professions in the management of pediatric diabetes technology, we used the methodology of Emotional Text Mining (ETM) [19,20]. ETM is a nonsupervised text mining procedure, based on a psychodynamic model and a socio-constructivist approach [21].…”

“…The semantic level focuses on the content of the communication while the semiotic level refers to the emotional symbolization within the communication. People emotionally symbolize an event or an object and socially share this symbolization, impacting people's behaviors, expectations and interactions through an unconscious mental processing [19,20,22]. ETM uses a statistical procedure that simulates the thinking process, starting from the semantic level (conscious) to the semiotic one (unconscious), while in human reality the process proceeds to the contrary [23].…”

“…Every country belongs to a different culture, which even within micro-groups such as those of professionals working with pediatric diabetes and CSII, may present possible differences. This is due to the emotional representations that characterize a particular group of people [19], which determine attitudes, emotions surrounding that topic, and consequently, behaviors and actions. It therefore seems crucial to explore the emotional representations in professionals dealing with this topic in Italy as well, in order to bring to light the latent culture that characterizes this topic.…”

Science Communication, Cultural Cognition, and the Pull of Epistemic Paternalism

“…Kahan offers the following a priori line of reasoning. 12 It would be a wild coincidence if background beliefs and credences that could explain Kahan's data correlated both with each other and with particular sets of political values. 13 Just looking at the contents of the issues and values in question: there's no reason why one's view on, for instance, the effect of concealed firearms on violence should correlate with one's views about the reality of human-made climate change; and there's no reason why one's belief on these scientific issues should correlate with one's political views.…”

Debunking creedal beliefs

“…Scientific consensus and the best available evidence support the idea that global temperatures are rising and that this will have dire effects if not dealt with urgently. Yet, opinion on this matter is polarized, and downplaying the risks can be a badge of tribal identity (Kahan 2012;Greco 2021). Now consider Susan, who believes that the idea of anthropogenic climate change is bunk.…”