Hi, everyone. Again, I’m very grateful for all the help I got on my survey from forum members. Now let me fill you in on how the survey is related to my research. (Excuse the length -- prolixity is an occupational hazard!)
It might help to start with the nature of the research more generally (the outlines of which have been described in pretty accurate terms in some of the recent posts). I and a number of other scholars are investigating what we call the influence of “cultural cognition” in legal and policy disputes. “Cultural cognition” refers to the tendency of cultural values to shape not only people’s moral understandings of what goals the law should pursue but also their *factual beliefs* about what effects laws actually achieve. Because it’s hard for most individuals to figure out from personal experience whether the death penalty deters murder, whether global warming is a serious danger, etc., they tend to rely on the views of those they trust. The people they trust, not surprisingly, are others who share their cultural values. As a result, factual beliefs about what dangers society faces and how the law should abate them become polarized along cultural lines.
One area where this seems to be so is gun control. The gun debate can be framed as one between competing conceptions of risk: that too little control will result in increased gun violence and accidents, and that too much control will render law-abiding persons unable to defend themselves from violent predation. We predicted -- and confirmed in a study we did last summer -- that which of these risks people see as more significant would depend on their cultural views. Persons who prefer a society that puts a premium on individual autonomy (we call them individualists) as well as those who prefer a society with myriad clearly distinguished social roles (we call them hierarchists; I wish we had a more accurate term, but we pretty much inherited it from others) tend to think that guns are safe, and that excessive gun regulation increases crime on net. In contrast, persons who favor group prerogatives over individual ones (communitarians or solidarists), as well as persons who favor obliteration of social distinctions of all sort (egalitarians), worry more about gun accidents and crime and think gun control is an effective way to address those problems.
Now as a number of you noted, it’s perfectly obvious that persons with “libertarian” political sensibilities would be strongly supportive of gun rights. But our point is a bit more subtle: it’s that individuals who hold particular cultural outlooks end up forming *factual* beliefs that support their values. Individualists believe that private ownership of guns *makes society safer.* Communitarians believe that private ownership of guns *makes society less safe*. So even if they could put their bigger philosophical differences aside and agree that the issue should be considered only in utilitarian terms, they’d *still* disagree about whether gun control is a good idea.
We believe this finding has important implications for law. Many think that the gun debate, for example, can be resolved simply by amassing more and more statistics on whether “more guns” mean “more crime” or “less” (to paraphrase the titles of some famous econometrics studies). Our work suggests, though, that this strategy won’t work (“more statistics, less persuasion” -- the title of one of our early papers). Individuals can’t be expected to agree on the facts until they find some way to work out their basic cultural differences. That's a tall order, yes, but one we believe would be desirable; we are committed pluralists, and find cultural partisanship of any sort is subversive of deliberative democracy and sound policymaking. Much of our work is therefore committed to identifying the circumstances in which individuals of diverse cultural persuasions can constructively engage in deliberation about guns and other contentious issues.
BTW, we *definitely* don't believe all citizens who oppose various forms of gun control or who favor it are zealots or extremists. On the contrary, the remarkable thing is how few of them are relative to the impression one gets from watching tv or reading newspapers, etc. (I credit Don Kates, who wrote a wonderful essay called Public Opinion: The Effects of Extremist Discourse on the Gun Debate, in The Great American Gun Debate 93 (D. B. Kates*Jr. and G. Kleck ed., 1997), and with whom I've had many profitable personal dealings, for helping me to get this important truth.
The survey you took part in, and offered me candid (!) and helpful feedback on, seeks to extend the work we've already done on this topic. One belief I have, for example, is that persons who have *lots* of knowledge about and interest in guns tend to be different from persons who just happen to oppose gun control for general cultural or ideological reasons. My hunch is that the fomer are a bit more “individualistic” and less “hierarchic,” in our terms. The results of the trial survey I ran with you in the last few days --one I publicized only on pro-gun discussion fora -- seemed to bear that out. The scores on our “culture scales” -- which came at the beginning of the survey -- showed respondents to be highly individualist but about average on the hierarchy-egalitarian scale.
I also found that there were interesting divergences among gun enthusiasts on the environment. Most of you were fairly skeptical about that global warming is a serious threat. But persons who were more “individualistic” felt that more strongly than persons who were more “hierarchic.” I found that result pretty interesting, and consistent with my hunch that one should be careful about lumping all gun enthusiasts together. On the basis of these results, I plan to include questions in future general population sample surveys to identify how much experience respondents have had with guns and how strongly they feel about the issue, etc.
Thanks again for helping me out. If you want more information about the nature of this work, check out “cultural cognition project” website (
http://research.yale.edu/culturalcognition/). I’m also happy to answer questions, either here or by email (dan.kahan@yale.edu).
Dan Kahan
Yale Law School
I never was good at judging Shibboleths anyway.