This article, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, was the first to introduce me to Dan Kahan:
- Striving for a Climate Change: To get beyond debates over science, Dan Kahan seeks their roots
I had picked up a copy of George Marshall's horribly titled Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (I can never remember it!), and there I found more about Dan Kahan, and his message about denialism and the axes of individualism versus communitarianism, and hierarchicalism versus egalitarianism:
I am a classic "egalitarian communitarian", which may explain my devotion to the cause. It seems that Republicans are more hierarchical/individuals. So there's a confounding of politics and these social scales.
Kahan also argues that issues like climate change get polluted (and I believe that's his word) by social identification. So Republicans are now using climate change denial as code for group identity.
"Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of people to fit their perceptions of risk and related facts to their group commitments,” says Dan Kahan, the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale Law school" Cultural Cognition and Scientific Consensus. And so it goes….
