A Dan Kahan Reader on Cultural Bias and Motivated Reasoning
As previously mentioned, here’s some Dan Kahan to liven up your day:
- Why we are poles apart on climate change – from Nature, a good overview of Kahan’s views and research. Doesn’t get too technical.
- The science communication problem: one good explanation, four not so good ones, and a fitting solution – From Kahan’s blog for the Cultural Cognition Project (CCP) at Yale, here’s an overview of his remarks at a recent panel discussion at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry’s CSICon Nashville conference.
- NARP: National Adaptation and Resiliency Plan — it both pays for & “frames” itself – Another blog post from the CCP site, this one outlining some of Kahan’s thoughts about something I’ve been thinking about for a few years now: that adaptation efforts (as distinct from mitigation) could serve as a point of entry with people who are culturally biased against believing in climate change, giving them a chance to do something real and useful, while exposing them to information that in time might lessen their resistance to mitigation.
- New paper: Cognitive Bias & the Constitution of Liberal Republic of Science – From the CCP site, heres an overview of a new paper Kahan is publishing (the full 26 pages of the paper are downloadable in PDF form here). More math, and the language is a little daunting at times; I haven’t read the entire paper yet myself. But it sounds like it provides a pretty rigorous view of where Kahan’s research has led him.
- Science communication & judicial-neutrality communication look the same to me – Notes from a panel talk Kahan gave recently at a conference on the Supreme Court and the public at the University of Chicago-Kent Law School. More accessible than the Cognitive Bias paper, and fascinating (to me) insight into this whole question of what expertise is, and how we, the non-expert, can reliably benefit from it.
