Dan Kahan responds to common criticism of cultural cognition studies:

People have a stake in protecting the social status of their cultural groups and their own standing in them. As a result, they defensively resist—close their minds to consideration of—evidence of risk that presented in a way that threatens their groups’ defining commitments.

But this process can be reversed. When information is presented in a way that affirms rather than threatens their group identities, people will engage open-mindedly with evidence that challenges their existing beliefs on issues associated with their cultural groups.

Not only have I and other cultural cognition researchers made this point (over & over; every time, in fact, we turn to normative implications of our work), we’ve presented empirical evidence to back it up.

When I presented my work on social cost, I was often asked, so assuming that Justices implicitly see one type of cost as greater than another. What can you do? I never had a good answer. I think this work may help in framing arguments in such a way that jurists predisposed to see only one type of costs.

Also this on debating experts (often the explicators of competing social costs):

But we also found that when the information is attributed to debating experts, the position people take depends heavily on the fit between their own values and the ones they perceive the experts to have.

This dynamic can aggravate polarization when people are bombarded with images that reinforce the view that the position they are predisposed to accept is espoused by experts who share their identities and denied by ones who hold opposing ones (consider climate change).

But it can also mitigate polarization: when individuals see evidence they are predisposed to reject being presented by someone whose values they perceive they share, they listen attentively to that evidence and are more likely to form views that are in accord with it.

Look: people aren’t stupid. They know they can’t resolve difficult empirical issues (on climate change, on HPV-vaccine risks, on nuclear power, on gun control, etc.) on their own, so they do the smart thing: they seek out the views of experts whom they trust to help them figure out what the evidence is. But the experts they are most likely to trust, not surprisingly, are the ones who share their values.

What makes me feel bleak about the prospects of reason isn’t anything we find in our studies; it is how often risk communicators fail to recruit culturally diverse messengers when they are trying to communicate sound science.