How Does the Public Move From Disagreement to Consensus?

At the Cultural Cognition Project, my collaborators and I have performed a series of studies that show individuals tend to conform their perceptions of risks—such as the ones associated with climate change, nuclear power production, HPV vaccination, hand gun possession, and the like—to ones that are congenial to their values. Our most recent experimental study (published in the Journal of Risk Research) shows why “scientific consensus” doesn’t neutralize this tendency: People’s perceptions of what most scientists believe are influenced by their values every bit as much as the rest of their beliefs are.

So, I’m asked, how can the public move from disagreement to consensus?

First of all, I reject the idea that there is any intrinsic value in the public moving from “disagreement” to “consensus.” It’s perfectly healthy and desirable for people to disagree about all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons, including differences in the values they use to evaluate the moral desirability of policies that trade off (under inevitable conditions of uncertainty) various risks and benefits. Democracy is generally a sensible way to resolve such disagreements.

What isn’t so good for a democracy, I’d say, is for citizens who agree about the ends of policy—to promote common health and welfare, to make them and their neighbors secure, to assure the environment they live in is fit for the flourishing of humans and other living creatures—to be propelled unconsciously by their values into a state of intense and persistent disagreement about the facts relevant to attaining those ends: Is the earth’s atmosphere heating up? If so, is nuclear power or geoengineering a sensible way to respond? Will arranging for my daughter to get the HPV vaccine do much good, or enough to outweigh any side effects?

It’s not harmful—it’s normal, healthy, perfectly commonplace—for people to disagree about these sorts of matters, and to disagree about what they imply for public policy; it’s a sign of our possession of the power to think critically and our disposition to do so that we debate such matters. What I’m saying is that it isn’t normal, healthy, or conducive to the well-being of a democratic political community for diverse citizens to end up polarized into opposing cultural factions on factual claims, the correctness or incorrectness of which actually doesn’t have anything to do with their values.

When this happens, it is the result of a pathology in our public discourse. All of us—ordinary citizens, high-profile political actors, Nobel Prize-winning scientists—must rely on cultural cues to help us figure out whom to trust on what; if we didn’t do that, and we didn’t do that well, our species would not be nearly as successful as it is in building progressively on our stock of common knowledge—indeed, we’d certainly all die, since none of us is in a position to acquire individually all the knowledge necessary to survive even in normal times, much less in the predictably extreme ones that circumstances predictably arrange for us to experience.

People belong (happily enough; it’s more interesting that way) to diverse cultural communities, which supply them with discrete sets of cues for figuring out whom to trust about what. Each of these discrete systems works well (those who follow any one that didn’t would have died out long ago), and in normal times, they get the different groups of people who adhere to them to the same place—viz., into possession of the best available scientific information at their common disposal, on the basis of which they can then deliberate about what to think and do. It is only when something goes wrong, and the discrete systems of cultural cues that we are all constrained to use get tangled in conflict, that we see different groups arrayed against each other for extended periods of time—not on what to do or the best way to live (they might disagree about that, too; that’s OK), but just about what the facts are, something they all have a common stake in figuring out.

The way to overcome that condition is to neutralize the forces that are causing those systems of cultural cues to clash rather than diverge. Our work suggests that cultural polarization over facts happens when the framing of information and the identity of information providers are arranged in patterns that convey—at first unconsciously, but soon enough in terms all can see—that the position society takes on a factual issue will amount to siding with one cultural group over another (a condition we call the “cognitively illiberal state”).

In our work, we have identified communication strategies that we think are useful for dispelling this condition. They involve consciously publicizing how particular scientific claims of risk, if established, will necessarily entail a variety of public policies, including ones that make use of and affirm all the diverse values and ways of living that exist in our society (this is almost always true; hard problems never have only one answer). Another thing is to assure that those who are interested in communicating what they understand to be the best science self-consciously include in their ranks individuals of diverse cultural outlooks—whom members of a plurality of communities will be able to trust. This isn’t hard to do. Because we are a diverse and independent lot, there will inevitably be a variety of credible people on all sides of every issue. All we really have to avoid is falling into the trap of entrusting the dissemination of information to actors who are disproportionately associated with only one outlook and way of life, particularly when those actors have a taste for framing the issue in terms that assault the reason and good will of those who disagree with them.

See? All very simple.

Well, that’s the real point. There are things to do, I think, once a society finds itself in the sad state of persistent cultural conflict of the sort we have on many policy issues. But these steps are admittedly difficult to implement—and will without question take considerable time to work, during which our deliberative and physical environments can both be expected to suffer. The scientific study of science communication (work done not just by us, but also by many many other scholars) is filled with insight on the conditions most likely to promote constructive democratic deliberation on issues of risk. Rather than waiting until we find ourselves asking how we move from public disagreement to consensus, we should be using that knowledge to prevent states of cultural polarization over science from occurring in the first place.

My collaborators at the Cultural Cognition Project are very interested in studying emerging technologies, such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology, precisely because those technologies are early enough in their careers to benefit from a careful and considered strategy of science communication—one aimed not at persuading anyone to believe any particular thing, but rather at creating conditions in which diverse citizens have the greatest chance of being apprised of the best available emerging science, whatever it might be, so they can then decide what they think the best and most responsible course is.

Dan Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and a member of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School.