Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect in Risk Perception

By Dan Kahan, Donald Braman, John Gastil, Paul Slovic, C. K. Mertz, J. Darley, Don Green, P. Sniderman, Christopher Winship. 2007

773 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Why do white men fear various risks less than women and minorities? Known as the “white-male effect,” this pattern is well documented but poorly understood. This article proposes a new explanation: identityprotective cognition. Putting work on the cultural theory of risk together with work on motivated cognition in social psychology suggests that individuals selectively credit and dismiss asserted dangers in a manner supportive of their cultural identities. This dynamic, it is hypothesized, drives the white-male effect, which reflects the risk skepticism that hierarchical and individualistic white males display when activities integral to their cultural identities are challenged as harmful. The article presents the results of an 1,800-person study that confirmed that cultural worldviews interact with the impact of gender and race on risk perception in patterns that suggest cultural-identity-protective cognition. It also discusses the implications of these findings for risk regulation and communication. Fear discriminates. Numerous studies show that risk perceptions are skewed across gender and race: women worry more than men, and minorities more than whites, about myriad dangers—from environmental pollution to

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5685fbc8fa1fa5b4e70827fc82daaf2a877b4024

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Citations in the corpus

Measuring cultural values and beliefs about environment to identify their role in climate change responses (2014, methodology): “The “cultural cognition thesis” (Kahan et al., 2007) frames cultural biases as relatively stable traits.”
Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government (2017, background): “So does the controversy over gun risks (Kahan et al., 2007; Gastil et al., 2011).”
Determining Where the Wild Things will be: Using Psychological Theory to Find Tolerance for Large Carnivores (2014, result): “This hypothesis is well supported in the risk literature (Slovic 1987; Kahan et al. 2007), as well as in a recent study that examined tolerance for black bears.”
Modeling Attitudes Toward Science: Development and Validation of the Credibility of Science Scale (2017, background): “Kahan has demonstrated that people high in these dimensions are less likely to believe scientific consensus across multiple scientific domains (Kahan et al., 2007; Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, & Braman, 2011; Kahan et al., 2012).”
Environmental risk perception among race and ethnic groups in the United States (2016, background): “Hypothesis 4 considers climate change and nuclear power plants, two perceived risks which, it has been argued, are closely tied to conservative white male identity (Brody, 1984; Finucane et al., 2000; Flynn et al., 1994; Kahan et al., 2007; McCright and Dunlap, 2011).”
Psychological Barriers to Energy Conservation Behavior: The Role of Worldviews and Climate Change Risk Perception (2018, background): “Slovic, Gastil, & Cohen, 2007) or a more general measure of environmental risks (Kahan et al., 2007).”
Cultural cognition of scientific consensus (2011, methodology): “…motivations to conform one’s beliefs to those of like-minded others in order to avoid dissonance and protect social standing (Cohen 2003; Kahan et al. 2007).1 For its part, cultural theory remedies the psychometric paradigm with a much-needed theory of individual differences: the…”
Understanding Public Hurricane Evacuation Decisions and Responses to Forecast and Warning Messages (2016, background): “…social organization and priorities (e.g., Douglas 1970; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Dake and Wildavsky 1990; Peters and Slovic 1996; Leiserowitz 2006; Kahan et al. 2007, 2011; Goebbert et al. 2012; McNeeley and Lazrus 2014; Greenberg et al. 2014; Lazrus 2015, manuscript submitted to Human Ecol.).”
Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States (2011, positive): “Responding to the first sentence in the above quote, Kahan et al. (2007) craft the identity-protective cognition thesis, which integrates insights from cultural theory and work on motivated cognition in social psychology.”
Bringing ideology in: the conservative white male effect on worry about environmental problems in the USA (2013, methodology): “…are others to have an individualist worldview (Finucane et al. 2000; Kahan et al. 2007; Palmer 2003), be antiegalitarian (Finucane et al. 2000; Flynn, Slovic, and Mertz 1994; Palmer 2003; Satterfield, Mertz, and Slovic 2004), and favor hierarchy (Flynn, Slovic, and Mertz 1994; Kahan et al. 2007).”
The social psychology of seismic hazard adjustment: re-evaluating the international literature (2010, background): “…minority of social psychologists argue for the centrality of cultural identities, intergroup relations, ideologies, emotions and social representations (e.g., Hogg and Smith, 2007; Joffe, 1999, 2003; Jost et al., 2004; Kahan et al., 2007; White et al., 2009) in people’s responses to risks.”
Cultural Cognition as a Conception of the Cultural Theory of Risk (2008, background): “technological risks vary sharply along the lines that Douglas andWildavsky suggests: that is, as individuals become simultaneously egalitarian and communitarian in their values, they become more concerned, and as they become hierarchical and individualistic less, with climate change, nuclear waste d”