Among the many oddly non-reflexive forms of reasoning that puzzle me about the case of nanotechnology is the obsession with risk perception. That is, not the study of objective risk, which is I think, a fully well developed scientific field, in which it is possible for instance in the case of the environmental and health issues associated with nanotechology to distinguish clearly between exposure risks and toxcicity and to find clever experimental ways to measure these risks in absolute and relative terms. The other side is the study of subjective risk–an area that also has a long and august, if somewhat more philosophical tradition, stretching back at least to Pascal. But for the most part, the study of “risk perception” proceeds in the most naive forms: We (experts) know the objective risks, but (they) the public refuses to see them, and instead relies on irrational, non-logical processes, “affect” and “values” that are not in sync with objective risk assessment. So, for instance, this study titled “Affect, Values, and Nanotechnology Risk Perceptions: An Experimental Investigation” by members of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale reveals that people’s understanding of facts are… wait for it… conditioned by their values! OMG! Stop the presses!
But seriously, it’s a very interesting article that explores “affect” and “value” as something which has, apparently, been absent from academic thinking on subjective risk perception. Fear, hope, disgust, anger, purity, danger? Indeed, Mary Douglas is paraded out here to make claims for “shared systems of cultural value.” The article makes a simple point that there are cognitive and cultural heuristics at work in the processing of information–Herbert Simon would be proud. But what’s ultimately frustrating is that 1) there is no sophistication to these models, they are simple cognitive processing models and 2) that they perforce treat the information being processed as neutral and unbiased, rather than the outcome of political contests, whose signs and signals are also apparent (i.e. when Nanotechnology is being done at Lawrence Livermore Labs, it’s not just another scientific field to most people, even very smart people in profound control of their affect). Would it make any difference to such a study if we actually gave the public credit for being more sophisticated observers of the political stakes not only of nanotechnology, but of nanotechnology information and facts about “risk” as well?
Then there is David Berube’s novel attempt to apply a similar heuristic to nanotoxicology (”intuitive toxicology”). I find this approach creative, but ultimately puzzling. It’s not clear what the goals of these kinds of analyses are: to make subjective risk perception coincide with objective risk perception? To find better ways to manipulate culture and affect in order to secure public assent? To make humans more rational? To defend the nanogravytrain from attacks by emotionally driven do-gooders taking time out from GM foods and Nuclear power? To understand “cultural cognition”?
Perhaps the point is a simple one: I think the fact that the goals of this kind of work are not clear is actually emblematic of the “risk perception” problem. The fact that no one really knows the interests of academics, especially those heavily funded by industry as well as government, contributes to the affect and “values” that shape public perception. Facts simply aren’t neutral, at least, not without a great deal of effort in making them so. But risk perception research seems to proceed as if there are no questions about facts, that they emerge clean and clear from laboratories that and neutral and untainted by the political sphere. The trick is not to make science more neutral, but to make it more clearly open, to reveal the “coarse signs” of its political claims to make the world (or humans) better (to recall Lippmann). But risk perception research so far seems to me to be little more than a replay of Edward Bernays “Engineering of Consent”– with considerably more sophisticated tools.
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There’s an interesting piece by Arie Rip on “folk theories” of nanotechnology that talks about some of this - what he calls “nanophobia-phobia”. One of the things that puzzles me is how natural scientists think about social science expertise in all this. A lot of ordinary nanoscientists I meet seem pretty perplexed at first as to what a “sociology of nanotechnology” would be or why it would be important; a little explanation gets them to the realization that there is this body of historians, anthropologists, sociologists who’ve studied similar problems and might have something relevant to say about risk perception.
I have a lot of respect for that class of nanoist whose instant response *isn’t* “let’s ask the social scientists” but who are willing to talk and figure out if there’s some intersection with their concerns. I have somewhat less respect for the more politically-savvy nanoists whose instant response (to certain audiences) *is* “let’s ask the social scientists” but whose idea of the space of social science comes from a wholly DC-oriented, numbers-driven, instrumental perspective. The findings of that kind of social science seem either highly problematic or true-but-trivial. Case in point - the Yale study you cited. Why has this been waved around so much as if it’s a big finding? Isn’t what they found basically: “if you ask people about something they’ve never heard of before, their reaction to it is influenced by their feelings toward things they have heard of before”?
I read this piece by Arie Rip (which is here btw), and I think it’s a start– a subtle argument for the most part, but one that seems to dovetail with my own recent understanding of “social imaginaries”– which is not quite the same think as a folk theory, but gestures towards the same kind of not-quite-theory but not just ideology approach (especially in the work of Charles Taylor).
Rip’s piece actually produced a bit of vertigo– partially because I work with Colvin, Kulinowski and CBEN at Rice, the subject of his first “folk theory” and I remember distinctly trying to articulate to them at one point that whenever they made claims about toxicity or exposure risk, they were extremely careful to back up all their claims with citations and references to ongoing work, but when they referred to the implications of nanotechnology, the great things it would provide or the new fields it would open up, or the ways “the public” could react– they were cavalier at best about the claims. Mostly this provoked only a kind of “gee, your right!” moment and then things would go on as usual– but I think it sunk in, because CBEN’s “implications” talk has morphed into ICON which is much more careful about the claims it makes and has narrowed its focus so that it engages much less (though still quite a bit) in folk theories.
In the end, I think the fact that “folk theories” exist, to use Rip’s term, is what needs explaining, not what does the explaining. Or to put it differently, there are multiple orders of rationality at work here, only one of which is scientific evidence for phenomena in the natural world, but only that one is getting any attention, whether from the risk perception side, or the anthropology of science side…
I’d like to know more about the context for the Cultural Cognition Project research - the story behind it, who began asking these questions in the first place, for whom the answers are valuable and how. There are several investors. The one that piques my interest most is Yale Law School - especially in terms of how it takes a firm front seat in the press release.
Some context: The Cultural Cognition Project was started about 5 years ago by a Yale Law School professor, Dan Kahan, and his collaborator, Don Brayman (then a Yale anthro-PhD and Yale Law student, now a professor at George Washington Law School). Several other collaborators from other institutions and congenial disciplines have since joined them.
In response to your specific query re the role of Yale Law School, Elise, the vast majority of CCP funding has come from the NSF. One small research-support fund at Yale Law School (the Oscar Ruebhausen Fund) chipped in to support a couple of their studies, but YLS is not an ‘investor’ in the overall project, except in the roundabout way that U.C. Berkeley is an ‘investor’ in Paul Rabinow: it gave Dan and Don an institutional home base in which to incubate their collaboration. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I was a colleague of Don’s — both joint anthro PhD-YLS students, he was in the YLS year after me — and was a student of Dan Kahan’s in his highly regarded criminal law class.) The way YLS appeared to you in the press release is very typical YLS trumpeting its progenies’ work. They have an excellent image-management team.
As I understand it, Dan and Don started the CCP as an attempt to create an alternative analytic and free the legal academy from a stranglehold hegemony that a discipline called ‘law and economics’ had exercised over it for the last 15 years or so. Law and economics uses almost exclusively quantitative methods to measure prospective, and retrospective, effects of legal or policy changes. Dan and Don are trying to advance the argument that it’s not numbers that persuade (or should be considered persuasive in policy formulation), it’s numbers plus the filters through which people read them. For a great example of their line, see the ‘More Statistics, Less Persuasion’ gun risk paper on their website. (Both Dan and Don are criminal law specialists, Don having written his anthro dissertation on families in D.C. affected by incarceration and Dan an early expert on community standards in criminal sentencing; hence, the preponderance of early CCP work on gun control and other crim-law topics.)
As Chris’ reaction shows, the underlying premise of their work might elicit a ‘So what else is new?’ reaction from us qualitative types, especially anthropologists. I think that their work would benefit from more inquiry into the concepts that they’re picking up: culture, values, affect, etc.. I’d be interested in what they, as users, might have to say about concepts we contend with as the currency of our discipline. However, I don’t want to nit-pick and lose the forest for the trees. Almost anyone who has spent time in a U.S. law school in recent years can vouch for the stifling analytic framework which is the butt of the CCP line of analysis. Viva la liberation! Viva la CCP!
Hi, Elisemc & other readers. The story behind cultural cognition project will of course be featured in HBO mini-series to be aired next yr but I can give you a sneak preview. The project was started by me (I’m on the faculty at Yale Law School) and Don Braman while Don was an anthropology Ph.D. student here at Yale (he finished the Ph.D., got a JD at Yale & is now on the faculty at GW Law School). We began with an interest in how the Douglas/Wildavsky/Dake cultural theory of risk could be applied to the gun control debate and branched out from there to a variety of topics. The animating theory behind the work is what we call the “cultural cognition thesis,” which asserts that cultural values are cognitive prior to factual beliefs about issues of societal risks and related policy matters. As you can see from materials on our website (http://research.yale.edu/culturalcognition/), we are trying to cash out this thesis with empirical methods, including survey work that seeks to show that such beliefs are distributed in patterns that can be explained only by the interaction of culture and cogntion; and (more recently) experiments that identify the discrete metchanisms through values exert this influence (the nano paper is the first public reporting of the results). We originally conceived of ourselves as doing “cultural theory” in Mary Douglas terms, but I think orthodox group-grid types (including Mary Douglas herself, who wrote a response to one of early papers) could justifiably view the worldviews we have come up w/ as, say, a first cousin of the ones featured n that typology. We also draw much inspiration from Paul DiMaggio’s essay, Culture and Cognition, Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997):263-287, which surmised that culture could be shown to exert a shaping influence on belief through dynamics of cognition central to social psychology (although Mary Douglas herself suggested this might well be so in her essay, “Depoliticization of Risk,” which invited Paul Slovic, who is also affiliated with CCP, and other adherents to the “pscyhometric” theory of risk to attend to way in which culture figures in cognitive processes). Our studies have been sponsored by NSF, by the Oscar M. Ruebhausen fund at Yale Law School, and (in the case of the nano study) by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.
I had an interesting correspondence with Christopher after seeing his original thoughtful post. The gist of his post — that mainstream “risk perception” work reflects a naive view of both what risk is and how people come to conceive of it — is very much in keeping with our work. Indeed, as I said to him, “The study in question, along w/ all the rest of our work, attacks the two manic conceits that characterize the dominant public-policy theorizing on risk regulation — (1) that the “truth” will prove itself if disseminated to public; (2) that public attitudes that diverge from expert expected-utility analysis are attributable to defects in rationality on the part of public and thus not entitled to normative weight in lawmaking. We argue, very much consistent with the spirit of your comment, that values mediate public comprehension of information in way that makes proposition (1) naive and proposition (2) a dangerous species of moral arrogance.” I don’t dispute Chrisotopher’s suggestion that the interaction of values & cognition *should* be obvious — but the fact is that it isn’t within a very prominent and influential policy discourse & we find that very troubling.
Well, that’s more than enough– but I certainly hope that readers of this blog will let me know if they find this line of work interesting & have suggestions about how it can be refined & extended. (We also love to collaborate w/ others who have shared interests.)
–Dan Kahan
There is a certain convergence between the discussion here and that raised in the post directly above (below? after? do prepositions work in blogs?) this one; namely, the question of how exactly to designate the nature of our contribution to some scientific endeavor or another as anthropologists-humanists-social scientists. I learned from Dan something that is worth repeating (which he suggested off blog): that it may be quixotic to use the tools of risk analysis and survey/experiment to measure affect and values (in addition to seeming “obvious” to anthropologists), but it is more effective than rolled eyes and hand-wringing, i.e. more effective than the attitude of ressentiment that characterizes much so-called critical anthropology. What I think distinguishes both the SynBERC Human Practices approach, and some of the various approaches to Nanotechnology, is they attempt to find some kind of third, or fourth or nth way between these two options. Call it an alternative rationality, or another mode of reasoning, or polemically, just an attempt to bring thinking back into the intellectual labor of science and engineering. In any case, they take a different form than that of CCP, though perhaps in the same spirit of improving not only the forms of research occuring in labs, but the forms of thinking and policymaking happening in DC.
I think the work of Dan and Don et.al. achieves some of this thinking, in a piecemeal, one-brick-at-a-time fashion. Posit affect, conduct survey, refine meaning of affect, posit affect-sub-0, conduct experiment… etc. This is laudable, controlled, and reflects the best of experimental practice in the sciences. But it also does so somewhat as if there were not already a very large number of different non-experimental, highly rational, ways of accounting for the relation of affect and value– or at least, it brackets such traditions so as to achieve clarity of a particular kind. SynBERC/EPNANO might have to find some kind of language to distinguish its practice qua experimental from that of CCP. We don’t conduct experiments of the same kind, but I think we are as curious about the possibility of creating concepts that do what “affect” does in this study–make distinctions and clarify issues that seem boggling to many.
I’m really enjoying this discussion.
While the Cultural Cognition Project has perhaps been a bit more trad-science than neuvo-ethnographic in its approach, I think we’re bricoleurs at heart - piece by piece, with whatever works best for that task/moment/audience. Methodological promiscuity of this sort is (to my mind, at least) better than than any single methodological ideal because, in truth, there is no ideal. So I applaud the effort to develop another (hybrid?) approach that isn’t quite settled in one tradition or another & am eager to see how it plays out in anthropology and beyond.
I’m really enjoying this discussion.
While the Cultural Cognition Project has perhaps been a bit more trad-science than neuvo-ethnographic in its approach, I think we’re bricoleurs at heart - piece by piece, with whatever works best for that task/moment/audience. Methodological promiscuity of this sort is (to my mind, at least) better than any single methodological ideal because, in truth, there is no ideal. So I applaud the effort to develop another (hybrid?) approach that isn’t quite settled in one tradition or another & am eager to see how it plays out in anthropology and beyond.
Thanks to Monica, Dan and Don for the background to the CCP. I should acknowledge that my queries are a little tangential to the main conversation here – and perhaps not well framed in the first instance. They were driven by my background and dissertation research interests in organizational ethics, how that relates to communication and practices and alignments with political, legal, economic (etc.) concerns not particular to the organization itself.
In the spirit of ‘the assembly of things’ and my interest in views about such alignments, my question was trying to get at what the research represents in it all. What is it about the present context that makes it possible now for so many entities to be interested in - to invest themselves in - this research topic or to even consider the kind of different analytic framework that Dan and Don advocate, i.e. appreciating more than numbers. I didn’t realize this was such a challenge in U.S. law schools for instance and in that vein Dan and Don may have a story or two to tell about how it has been to make the case for their work up to now.
Many thanks for the links, the background and the reading suggestions.