Cultural Cognition - Relationship To Other Risk Perception Theories

Relationship To Other Risk Perception Theories

Cultural cognition is a descendant of two other theories of risk perception. The first is the cultural theory of risk associated with anthropologist Mary Douglas and political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. The cultural cognition hypothesis is derived from Douglas and Wildavsky's claim, advanced most notably in their controversial book Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers (1982), that individuals selectively attend to risks in a manner that expresses and reinforces their preferred way of life.

Cultural cognition researchers, along with other scholars who have investigated Douglas and Wildavsky’s theory empirically, use attitudinal scales that reflect Douglas’s worldview typology. That typology characterizes worldviews, or preferences about how society should be organized, along two cross-cutting dimensions: “group,” which refers to how individualistic or group-oriented a society should be; and “grid,” which refers to how hierarchical or egalitarian a society should be.

The second theory is the “psychometric paradigm,” to which Paul Slovic, a member of the Cultural Cognition Project, has made significant contributions. The psychometric paradigm links risk perceptions to various cognitive and social mechanisms that generally evade simpler, rational choice models associated with economics. Cultural cognition theory posits that these mechanisms mediate between, or connect, individuals’ cultural values to their perceptions of risk and other policy-relevant beliefs.

Combing the cultural theory of risk and the psychometric paradigm, cultural cognition, its exponents claim, remedies difficulties with each. The mechanisms featured in the psychometric paradigm (and in social psychology generally) furnish a cogent explanation of why individuals adopt states of mind that fit and promote the aims of groups, including ones featured in Douglas’s culture theory. They do so, moreover, in a manner that avoids “functionalism,” a criticized form of analysis that identifies group interests, rather than individual ones, as a cause for human action. At the same time cultural theory, by asserting the orienting role of values, explains how the mechanisms featured in the psychometric paradigm can result in differences in risk perception among persons who hold different values. The interrelationship between individual values and perceptions of risk also calls into doubt the depiction of risk perceptions deriving from these mechanisms as products of irrationality or cognitive defect.