Fake News? Enh. 'Alternative Facts'? Watch Out.
High-status superspreaders of misinformation pose a greater threat to democratic epistemology than ordinary fake news spread on social media.
Read post →The Cultural Cognition Project is an interdisciplinary research initiative studying how shared cultural worldviews influence risk perception, science communication, and public policy beliefs — and what this means for democratic governance.
Six interconnected domains where cultural cognition shapes public understanding of empirical evidence.
How cultural worldviews shape the assessment of environmental, technological, and social risks across diverse populations.
Explore →Evidence-based strategies for communicating scientific findings to culturally diverse publics without triggering identity-protective responses.
Explore →The mechanisms by which identity-protective cognition distorts evidence evaluation — and how these mechanisms can be counteracted.
Explore →What science literacy actually measures — and why higher numeracy can increase polarization rather than reduce it on culturally contested issues.
Explore →How science curiosity moderates identity-protective cognition — a promising avenue for depolarizing public engagement with scientific evidence.
Explore →Applications of cultural cognition theory to constitutional law, regulatory policy, and democratic deliberation on risk-relevant science.
Explore →| Egalitarian | Hierarchical | |
|---|---|---|
| Communitarian | Egal. Communitarian Perceives high risk in climate change, nuclear power, guns. Favors regulation and collective action. |
Hier. Communitarian Defers to traditional authority; culturally selective trust in scientific consensus. |
| Individualist | Egal. Individualist Supports personal freedom and social equality; mixed risk perceptions depending on policy context. |
Hier. Individualist Perceives low risk in climate change and guns; high risk in regulation of industry and markets. |
Cultural Cognition theory maps individuals along two dimensions: hierarchy vs. egalitarianism (attitudes toward social stratification) and individualism vs. communitarianism (attitudes toward collective vs. individual responsibility).
These worldview dimensions predict risk perception on contested issues — climate change, gun control, nuclear power, vaccines — far better than political party affiliation, education, or income alone.
Explore the CC Dictionary →Dan Kahan's ongoing commentary on science communication, risk perception, and cultural cognition research.
High-status superspreaders of misinformation pose a greater threat to democratic epistemology than ordinary fake news spread on social media.
Read post →Are scientists themselves susceptible to identity-protective cognition? Evidence from the sociology of science suggests yes — under specific conditions.
Read post →Public shaming of those who reject scientific consensus is not only ineffective — it actively reinforces the identity-protective responses it aims to overcome.
Read post →The documented decline in conservative trust in science is issue-specific, not general — and reflects cultural coding of scientific findings.
Read post →Charges of 'motivated reasoning' deployed asymmetrically — aimed only at opponents — are themselves a symptom of the phenomenon being diagnosed.
Read post →Higher science literacy is associated with greater polarization on culturally contested risks — not less. The bounded rationality explanation doesn't survive empirical scrutiny.
Read post →The most cited works from the Cultural Cognition Project research program.
Key concepts from the Cultural Cognition Project research program — explained.
Cultural Cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to form beliefs about societal risks and related policy-relevant facts that reflect their shared cultural values. People with different cultural worldviews — hierarchical vs. egalitarian, individualist vs. communitarian — systematically perceive the same empirical evidence differently. This phenomenon was documented and named by Dan M. Kahan and colleagues at Yale Law School's Cultural Cognition Project.
Identity-protective cognition is the unconscious tendency to process empirical evidence in ways that protect one's cultural group identity rather than to reach accurate conclusions. When a scientific finding threatens the worldview of a cultural group, members of that group selectively discount the evidence — not because they lack intelligence, but because accepting it would signal disloyalty to their group. Research by the Cultural Cognition Project shows that higher science literacy and numeracy can actually amplify this effect.
Counter-intuitively, research by Dan Kahan and the Cultural Cognition Project shows that people with higher science literacy and numeracy are more polarized on issues like climate change — not less. This is because scientifically literate individuals are better equipped to find and construct identity-consistent arguments, selectively crediting evidence that supports their cultural worldview and discrediting evidence that challenges it. This finding, published in Nature Climate Change (2012), overturns the assumption that public disagreement about science stems from ignorance.
The Cultural Cognition Project (CCP) is an interdisciplinary research initiative based at Yale Law School, led by Professor Dan M. Kahan. Founded in the late 1990s, the project studies how cultural values shape risk perception, science communication, and public policy beliefs. Its research has been published in Nature Climate Change, Science, the Yale Law Journal, and other peer-reviewed venues, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Dan M. Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School. He is the lead researcher and founder of the Cultural Cognition Project. His research focuses on risk perception, science communication, motivated reasoning, and the application of decision science to law and democratic policymaking. He is best known for his work on identity-protective cognition, motivated numeracy, and the science communication problem.
Motivated numeracy is the phenomenon whereby individuals use their quantitative reasoning ability not to reach accurate conclusions, but to confirm their culturally preferred beliefs. In a landmark experiment, Dan Kahan showed that highly numerate people performed better on a neutral statistical task but showed greater political polarization when the same task was framed as a gun control question. This demonstrates that numerical skill can be recruited for identity-protective rather than truth-seeking purposes.
Cultural Cognition Project research shows that vaccine hesitancy does not follow a simple left-right political divide. Instead, it reflects complex interactions between cultural worldviews, trust in different types of authority, and the specific framing of vaccine communications. The project has studied HPV vaccine risk perceptions, childhood vaccination attitudes, and the science communication strategies most likely to protect the vaccine science communication environment from cultural polarization.
A polluted science communication environment is a condition in which accurate scientific information can no longer reliably inform public risk perceptions because the social meaning of that information has become entangled with cultural identity. When a scientific finding becomes a symbol of one cultural group's values, members of opposing groups will discount it regardless of its evidentiary strength. The Cultural Cognition Project studies how this pollution occurs and how it can be prevented or remedied.
The Cultural Cognition Project (CCP) is an interdisciplinary research initiative based at Yale Law School. Founded by Dan M. Kahan, the project investigates how shared cultural values — rather than factual knowledge or analytical ability — determine how individuals perceive risks and evaluate scientific evidence on contested policy issues.
The project's central finding is that on issues like climate change, nuclear power, gun control, and vaccine safety, people who score higher on science literacy and numeracy are more likely to be polarized — not less. This phenomenon, known as identity-protective cognition, occurs because individuals unconsciously evaluate evidence in ways that protect their cultural group identity rather than to reach accurate conclusions.
Traditional models of science communication assume that public disagreement about risks stems from a lack of information — that if people simply knew more about climate science, they would converge on the scientific consensus. The Cultural Cognition Project's research consistently refutes this assumption. Risk perception is shaped primarily by cultural worldviews: egalitarians and communitarians tend to perceive high risk in industrial activities and low risk in socially equalizing technologies, while hierarchical individualists show the reverse pattern.
These differences persist regardless of education level, income, or political sophistication — and they are amplified, not reduced, by higher cognitive ability. Understanding this dynamic is essential for designing science communication strategies that actually work.
The Cultural Cognition Project's research has profound implications for how scientists, policymakers, and communicators approach contested empirical issues. Rather than simply presenting more data or emphasizing expert consensus, effective science communication must account for the cultural context in which messages are received. This means identifying trusted communicators within diverse cultural communities, framing evidence in ways that do not trigger identity-protective responses, and building what the project calls a healthy science communication environment — one in which citizens across cultural backgrounds can engage with accurate scientific information without having to choose between that information and their cultural identities.
The project's published research has appeared in Nature Climate Change, Science, the Yale Law Journal, and numerous other peer-reviewed venues, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Annenberg Foundation.