Act II, Scene 3

Cultural Cognition – Dan Kahan and Others

Scenes 1 and 2 of this act looked at the ways in which our brains filtered and transformed incoming information from our senses. This scene looks at the way this incoming information is further transformed by those around us and by our culture. Among the most prominent groups working on the phenomenon, called Cultural Cognition, is the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School and Dan Kahan. The screenshot below is from that project.

The web site for this project is undergoing changes. This excerpt comes from click here.

The key phrase in the excerpt is: “… the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact to … values that define their cultural identities.”

We live in highly polarized times in which phrases like “alternate facts” have become normalized. As mathematicians, scientists and educators who work everyday with facts and with people whose background and culture may be quite different from our own we need to be aware of how cultural cognition intervenes between raw facts and beliefs. One of the most widely quoted and interesting papers in this area is “Science Literacy and Cultural Polarization” by Dan Kahan. Another good reference is “Individuals with Greater Science Literacy and Education Have More Polarized Beliefs on Controversial Science Topics” by Caitlin Drummond and Baruch Fischoff which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science on August 21, 2017. This article is more readily available than the one by Dan Kahan.