More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions

What motivates individuals to support or oppose the legal regulation of guns? What sorts of evidence or arguments are likely to promote a resolution of the gun control debate? Using the survey methods associated with the cultural theory of risk, we demonstrate that individuals’ positions on gun control derive from their cultural world views: individuals of an egalitarian or solidaristic orientation tend to support gun control, those of a hierarchical or individualist orientation to oppose it. Indeed, cultural orientations so defined are stronger predictors of individuals’ positions than is any other fact about them, including whether they are male or female, white or black, Southerners or Easterners, urbanites or country dwellers, conservatives or liberals. The role of culture in determining attitudes towards guns suggests that econometric analyses of the effect of gun control on violent crime are unlikely to have much impact. As they do when they are evaluating empirical evidence of environmental and other types of risks, individuals can be expected to credit or dismiss empirical evidence on “gun control risks” depending on whether it coheres or conflicts with their cultural values. Rather than focus on quantifying the impact of gun control laws on crime, then, academics and others who want to contribute to resolving the gun debate should dedicate themselves to constructing a new expressive idiom that will allow citizens to debate the cultural issues that divide them in an open and constructive way

Overcoming the Fear of Guns, the Fear of Gun Control, and the Fear of Cultural Politics: Constructing a Better Gun Debate

The question of how strictly to regulate firearms has convulsed the national polity for the better part of four decades, and in this article Donald Braman and Dan M. Kahan conclude that the best way to engender productive debate is to investigate deeper than the statistics and address the competing American social attitudes on guns themselves: guns symbolizing honor, human mastery over nature, and individual self-sufficiency on the one hand, and guns creating the perpetuation of illicit social hierarchies, the elevation of force over reason, and the expression of collective indifference to the well-being of strangers on the other. Braman and Kahan posit that purely instrumental arguments lack the power to persuade either side because they ignore what really motivates individuals to favor or oppose gun control—namely, their competing cultural worldviews and identities. They claim that the only meaningful gun control debate is one that explicitly addresses whether and how the underlying cultural visions at stake should be embodied by American law. Therefore, to improve the quality of the U.S. gun control debate and break its impasse, Braman and Kahan argue for the constructive of a new, culturally pluralistic vocabulary, which embraces the cultural meanings of public policy, rather than eliding or suppressing them

Beyond the Gun Fight: The Aftermath of the Virginia Tech Massacre

Which side of the gun debate loses ground after the Virginia Tech Massacre? Neither. Here\u27s why

The Self-Defensive Cognition of Self-Defense

Why do certain self-defense cases - ones, e.g., involving battered women who kill their sleeping abusers, or beleaguered commuters who shoot panhandling minority teens - provoke intense political conflict? The conventional and seemingly obvious answer is that people judge such cases in a politically partisan fashion. This paper, however, suggests a subtler and more complex explanation. Social psychologists have shown that individuals resolve factual ambiguities in a manner supportive of their defining values, both to minimize dissonance and to protect their connection to others who share their commitments. This form of self-defensive cognition, it is submitted, shapes individuals\u27 perceptions of violent interactions between parties seen to be complying with or defying contested social norms. As a result, even individuals who are trying to decide such cases based on honest and politically impartial assessments of the facts polarize along cultural lines. The paper presents the results of an original empirical study (N = 1,600) that supports this hypothesis. It also explores the normative significance of this account of the origins of political conflict over self-defense cases and how such conflict can be mitigated

Overcoming the Fear of Guns, the Fear of Gun Control, and the Fear of Cultural Politics: Constructing a Better Gun Debate

The question of how strictly to regulate firearms has convulsed the national polity for the better part of four decades, and in this article Donald Braman and Dan M. Kahan conclude that the best way to engender productive debate is to investigate deeper than the statistics and address the competing American social attitudes on guns themselves: guns symbolizing honor, human mastery over nature, and individual self-sufficiency on the one hand, and guns creating the perpetuation of illicit social hierarchies, the elevation of force over reason, and the expression of collective indifference to the well-being of strangers on the other. Braman and Kahan posit that purely instrumental arguments lack the power to persuade either side because they ignore what really motivates individuals to favor or oppose gun control—namely, their competing cultural worldviews and identities. They claim that the only meaningful gun control debate is one that explicitly addresses whether and how the underlying cultural visions at stake should be embodied by American law. Therefore, to improve the quality of the U.S. gun control debate and break its impasse, Braman and Kahan argue for the constructive of a new, culturally pluralistic vocabulary, which embraces the cultural meanings of public policy, rather than eliding or suppressing them

Cultural Cognition and Public Policy

Our concern in this Essay is to explain the epistemic origins of political conflict. Citizens who agree that the proper object of law is to secure society\u27s material well-being are still likely to disagree-intensely-about what policies will achieve that end as an empirical matter. Does the death penalty deter homicides, or instead inure people to lethal violence? Would stricter gun control make society safer, by reducing the incidence of crime and gun accidents, or less safe, by hampering the ability of individuals to defend themselves from predation? What threatens our welfare more-environmental pollution or the economic consequences of environmental protection laws? What exacts a bigger toll on public health and productivity-the distribution of street drugs or the massive incarceration of petty drug offenders

Caught in the Crossfire: A Defense of the Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions

In this article, Dan Kahan and Donald Braman expand upon the cultural theory of gun-risk perception and respond to the commentaries on their previous article, More Statistics, Less Persuasion: A Cultural Theory of Gun-Risk Perceptions, 151 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1291 (2003). Their critics argue that the authors are too quick to dismiss the power of empirical information to influence individuals’ positions on gun control. But in analyzing the variety of their critics’ arguments, Kahan and Braman note the strange pattern of opinions that has emerged on the relative importance of culture and data in the gun debate. What could explain the puzzling congruence of opinion among staunch procontrollers and anticontrolles, all of whom concluded that data mattered most? What commonality could explain the agreement of a Texas law professor and a British social anthropologist that culture is in fact more important? Committed to furnishing empirical proof of the powerlessness of empirical proofs, Kahan and Braman constructed a regression analysis to answer these questions. They conclude in this article that this final study conclusively proves their assertion that statistics are incapable of persuading anyone to accept anything they don’t already believe; or, in other words, that the cultural basis of gun-risk perceptions better explains public perceptions in the gun control debate than a pure empirical information theory

Cultural Cognition and Public Policy.

Our concern in this Essay is to explain the epistemic origins of political conflict. Citizens who agree that the proper object of law is to secure society’s material well-being are still likely to disagree—intensely—about what policies will achieve that end as an empirical matter. Does the death penalty deter homicides, or instead inure people to lethal violence? Would stricter gun control make society safer, by reducing the incidence of crime and gun accidents, or less safe, by hampering the ability of individuals to defend themselves from predation? What threatens our welfare more—environmental pollution or the economic consequences of environmental protection laws? What exacts a bigger toll on public health and productivity—the distribution of street drugs or the massive incarceration of petty drug offenders