Okay, this is the first of what I anticipate will be a series of posts (somewhere between 2 and 376 in number). In them, I want to take up the question of who the people are who are being described by the “cultural worldview” framework that informs cultural cognition.
The specific occasion for wanting to do this is a query from Jen Briselli, which I reproduce below. In it, you’ll see, she asks me to set forth brief sketches of the “typical” egalitarian communitarian, hierarchical individualist, hierarchical communitarian, and hierarchical individualist. This is a reasonable request. In my immediate reply, I say that any such exercise has to be understood as a simplification or a heuristic; the people who have any one of these identities will be multifaceted and complex, and also diverse despite having important shared understandings.
I think that’s a reasonable point to make, too – yet I then beg off on (or at least defer) actually responding to her request. That wasn’t so reasonable of me!
So I will do as she asks.
But I thought it would be useful, as well as interesting, to first ask others who are familiar with “cultural cognition” framework as I and others are elaborating it, how they might answer this question. So that’s what I’m doing in this post, which reproduces the exchange between Jen and me.
Below the exchange, I also set fort the sort of exposition of the “cultural worldview” framework, which we adapt from Mary Douglas, that typically appears in our papers. I think this is basically the right way to set things out in the context of this species of writing. But the admitted abstractness of it is what motivates Jen’s reasonable request for something more concrete, more accessible, more engaging.
I’ll give my own answer to Jen’s question in the next post or two. I promise!
I have a quick question/exercise for you:
I am working through the process of creating what are essentially 'personas' (though I'm keeping them abstract) for each of the four quadrants of the group/grid cultural cognition map. While I feel pretty comfortable characterizing some of the high-level concerns and values of each worldview, I would certainly be silly to think my nine months' immersion in your research comes anywhere near the richness of your own mental model for this framework. So, to supplement my own work, I'd love to know how you would describe each worldview, in the most basic and simplified way, to someone unfamiliar with cultural cognition. (Well, maybe not totally unfamiliar, but in the process of learning it). That is, how do you joke about these quadrants? How do you describe them at cocktail parties?
For example, I found the fake book titles that you made up for the [HPV vaccine risk] study to be a great of example for personifying a prototypical example of each worldview. And I am interested in walking that line between prototype and stereotype, because that's where good design happens- we can oversimplify and stereotype to get at something's core, then step back up a few levels to find the sweet spot for understanding.
So, if you'd be so kind, what few words or phrases would you use to complete the following phrases, for each of the four worldviews?
1) I feel most threatened by:
2) What I value most:
and optional but would be fun to see your answers:
3) the typical 'bumper sticker' or phrase that embodies each worldview: (for example- egalitarian communitarians might pick something like "one for all and all for one!" I'm curious if you have any equivalents for the others rattling around in your brain- serious or absurd, or anywhere in between.)
What you are asking about here is complicated; I'm anxious to avoid a simple response that might not be clearly understood as very very simplified.
The truth is that I don't think people of these types are likely to use bumper stickers to announce their allegiances. Some would, certainly; but they are very extreme, unusual people! If not extreme in their values, extreme in how much they value expressing them. The goal is to understand very ordinary people -- & I hope that is who we are succeeding in modeling.
I feel reasonably confident that I can find those people by getting them to respond to the sorts items we use in our worldview scales, or by doing a study that ties their perceptions of source credibility to the cues used in the HPV study.
But I think if I said, "Watch for someone who gets in your face & says 'you should encourage your young boys to be more sensitive and less rough and tough' "-- that would paint an exaggerated picture.
I think we do have reliable ways to pick out people who have the sorts of dispositions I'm talking about. But we live in a society where people interact w/ all sorts of others & actually are mindful not to force people different from them to engage in debates over issues like this.
From Kahan, D.M., Cultural Cognition as a Conception of the Cultural Theory of Risk, in Handbook of Risk Theory: Epistemology, Decision Theory, Ethics and Social Implications of Risk. (eds. R. Hillerbrand, P. Sandin, S. Roeser & M. Peterson) 725-760 (Springer London, Limited, 2012), pp. 727-28:
The cultural theory of risk asserts that individual’s should be expected to form perceptions of risk that reflect and reinforce their commitment to one or another “cultural way of life” (Thompson, Ellis & Wildavsky 1990). The theory uses a scheme that characterizes cultural ways of life and supporting worldviews along two cross-cutting dimensions (Figure 1), which Douglas calls “group” and “grid” (Douglas, 1970; 1982). A “weak” group way of life inclines people toward an individualistic worldview, highly “competitive” in nature, in which people are expected to “fend for themselves” without collective assistance or interference (Rayner, 1992, p. 87). In a “strong” group way of life, in contrast, people “interact frequently in a wide range of activities” in which they “depend on one another” to achieve their joint ends. This mode of social organization “promotes values of solidarity rather than the competitiveness of weak group” (ibid., p. 87).
A “high” grid way of life organizes itself through pervasive and stratified “role differentiation” (Gross & Rayner 1985, p. 6). Goods and offices, duties and entitlements, are all “distributed on the basis of explicit public social classifications such as sex, color, . . . a bureaucratic office, descent in a senior clan or lineage, or point of progression through an age-grade system” (ibid, p. 6). It thus conduces to a “hierarchic” worldview that disposes people to “devote a great deal of attention to maintaining” the rank-based “constraints” that underwrite “their own position and interests” (Rayner 1990, p. 87).
Finally, a low grid way of life consists of an “egalitarian state of affairs in which no one is prevented from participation in any social role because he or she is the wrong sex, or is too old, or does not have the right family connections” (Rayner 1990, p. 87). It is supported by a correspondingly egalitarian worldview that emphatically denies that goods and offices, duties and entitlements, should be distributed on the basis of such rankings.
The cultural theory of risk makes two basic claims about the relationship between cultural ways of life so defined and risk perceptions. The first is that recognition of certain societal risks tends to cohere better with one or another way of life. One way of life prospers if people come to recognize that an activity symbolically or instrumentally aligned with a rival way of life is causing societal harm, in which case the activity becomes vulnerable to restriction, and those who benefit from that activity become the targets of authority-diminishing forms of blame (Douglas, 1966; 1992).
The second claim of cultural theory is that individuals gravitate toward perceptions of risk that advance the way of life they adhere to. “[M]oral concern guides not just response to the risk but the basic faculty of [risk] perception” (Douglas, 1985, p. 60). Each way of life and associated worldview “has its own typical risk portfolio,” which “shuts out perception of some dangers and highlights others,” in manners that selectively concentrate censure on activities that subvert its norms and deflect it away from activities integral to sustaining them (Douglas & Wildavsky 1982, pp. 8, 85). Because ways of life dispose their adherents selectively to perceive risks in this fashion, disputes about risk, Douglas and Wildavsky argue, are in essence parts of an “ongoing debate about the ideal society” (ibid, p. 36).
The paradigmatic case, for Douglas and Wildavsky, is environmental risk perception. Persons disposed toward the individualistic worldview supportive of a weak group way of life should, on this account, be disposed to react very dismissively to claims of environmental and technological risk because they recognize (how or why exactly is a matter to consider presently) that the crediting of those claims would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry, forms of behavior they like. The same orientation toward environmental risk should be expected for individuals who adhere to the hierarchical worldview: in concerns with environmental risks, they will apprehend an implicit indictment of the competence and authority of societal elites. Individuals who tend toward the egalitarian and solidaristic worldview characteristic of strong group and low grid, in contrast, dislike commerce and industry, which they see as sources of unjust social disparities, and as symbols of noxious self-seeking, They therefore find it congenital to credit claims that those activities are harmful—a conclusion that does indeed support censure of those who engage in them and restriction of their signature forms of behavior (Wildavsky & Dake 1990; Thompson, Ellis, & Wildavsky 1990).