Persons who subscribe to relatively egalitarian and communitarian values, in contrast, readily credit claims of environmental risks, which is consistent with their moral suspicion of commerce and industry as sources of inequality and symbols of excessive self-seeking.
The first consists of general survey data that suggest that individuals’ values more strongly predict their risk perceptions than do other characteristics such as race, gender, economic status, and political orientations.
[3][4] The second type of evidence consists in experiments that identify discrete psychological processes that connect individuals’ values to their beliefs about risk and related facts.
[7] Such processes, the experiments suggest, often result in divisive forms of cultural conflict over facts, but can also be managed in fashions that reduce such disagreement.
A study conducted by Cultural Cognition Project researchers (using a nationally representative U.S. sample) found that ordinary members of the public do not become more concerned about climate change as their science comprehension increases.
[14] Other studies have found that individuals' cultural worldviews influence their perceptions of consent in an acquaintance or date rape scenario,[15] and of the imminence of violence and other facts in self-defense cases involving either battered women or interracial confrontations.
The psychometric paradigm links risk perceptions to various cognitive and social mechanisms that generally evade simpler, rational choice models associated with economics.
They do so, moreover, in a manner that avoids "functionalism," a criticized form of analysis that identifies group interests, rather than individual ones, as a cause for human action.
Mary Douglas herself has criticized cultural cognition for a conception of values that is too tightly modeled on American political disputes and that implicitly disparages the "hierarchical" worldview.
[26] Finally, some scholars who emphasize elements of the psychometric paradigm suggest that the influence of cultural values on risk perceptions is best understood as simply an additional source of interference with the rational processing of information.