The Example Rule provides another opportunity for culture to influence Gut. That’s because the Example Rule—the easier it is to recall examples of something happening, the greater the likelihood of that thing happening—hinges on the strength of the memories we form. And the strength of our memories depends greatly on attention: If I focus strongly on something and recall it repeatedly, I will remember it much better than if I only glance at it and don’t think about it again. And what am I most likely to focus on and recall repeatedly? Whatever confirms my existing thoughts and feelings. And what am I least likely to focus on and recall repeatedly? Whatever contradicts my thoughts and feelings. And what is a common source of the thoughts and feelings that guide my attention and recall? Culture.
The people around us are another source of cultural influence. Our social networks aren’t formed randomly, after all. We are more comfortable with people who share our thoughts and values. We spend more time with them at work, make them our friends, and marry them. The Young Republican with the Ronald Reagan T-shirt waiting in an airport to catch a flight to Washington, D.C., may find himself chatting with the antiglobalization activist with a Che Guevara beret and a one-way ticket to Amsterdam, but it’s not likely he will be adding her to his Christmas card list—unlike the MBA student who collides with the Young Republican at the check-in line because she was distracted by the soaring eloquence of Ronald Reagan’s third State of the Union Address playing on her iPod. So we form social networks that tend to be more like than unlike, and we trust the people in our networks. We value their opinions and we talk to them when some new threat appears in the newspaper headlines. Individually, each of these people is influenced by culture just as we are, and when culture leads them to form a group opinion, we naturally want to conform to it.
The manifestations of culture I’ve discussed so far—Mexican vacations, alcohol and illicit drugs, kosher food—have obvious origins, meaning, and influence. But recent research suggests cultural influences run much deeper.
In 2005, Dan Kahan of the Yale Law School, along with Paul Slovic and others, conducted a randomly selected, nationally representative survey of 1,800 Americans. After extensive background questioning, people were asked to rate the seriousness of various risks, including climate change, guns in private hands, gun-control laws, marijuana, and the health consequences of abortion.
One result was entirely expected. As in many past surveys, nonwhites rated risks higher than whites and women believed risks were more serious than men. Put those two effects together and you get what is often called the white-male effect. White men routinely feel hazards are less serious than other people. Sociologists and political scientists might think that isn’t surprising. Women and racial minorities tend to hold less political, economic, and social power than white men and have less trust in government authorities. It makes sense that they would feel more vulnerable. But researchers have found that even after statistically accounting for these feelings, the disparity between white men and everybody else remains. The white-male effect also cannot be explained by different levels of scientific education—Paul Slovic has found that female physical scientists rate the risks of nuclear power higher than male physical scientists, while female members of the British Toxicological Society were far more likely than male members to rate the risk posed by various activities and technologies as moderate or high.
It is a riddle. A hint of the answer was found in an earlier survey conducted by Paul Slovic in which he discovered that it wasn’t all white males who perceived things to be less dangerous than everybody else. It was only a subset of about 30 percent of white males. The remaining 70 percent saw things much as women and minorities did. Slovic’s survey also revealed that the confident minority of white men tended to be better-educated, wealthier, and more politically conservative than others.
The 2005 survey was designed in part to figure out what was happening inside the heads of white men. A key component was a series of questions that got at people’s most basic cultural world views. These touched on really basic matters of how human societies should be organized. Should individuals be self-reliant? Should people be required to share good fortune? And so on. With the results from these questions, Kahan slotted people into one of four world views (developed from the Cultural Theory of Risk first advanced by the anthropologist Mary Douglas and political scientist Aaron Wildavsky). In Kahan’s terms they were individualist, egalitarian, hierarchist, and communitarian.
When Kahan crunched his numbers, he found lots of correlations between risk and other factors like income and education. But the strongest correlations were between risk perception and world view. If a person were, for example, a hierarchist—someone who believes people should have defined places in society and respect authority—you could quite accurately predict what he felt about various risks. Abortion? A serious risk to a woman’s health. Marijuana? A dangerous drug. Climate change? Not a big threat. Guns? Not a problem in the hands of law-abiding citizens.
Kahan also found that a disproportionate number of white men were hierarchists or individualists. When he adjusted the numbers to account for this, the white-male effect disappeared. So it wasn’t race and gender that mattered. It was culture. Kahan confirmed this when he found that although black men generally rated the risks of private gun ownership to be very high, black men found to be individualist rated guns a low risk—just like white men who were individualist.
Hierarchists also rated the risk posed by guns to be low. Communitarians and egalitarians, however, feel they are very dangerous. Why? The explanation lies in feelings and the cultures that create them. “People who’ve been raised in a relatively individualistic community or who’ve been exposed to certain kinds of traditional values will have a positive association with guns,” Kahan says. “They’ll have positive emotions because they’ll associate them with individualistic virtues like self-reliance or with certain kinds of traditional roles like a protective father. Then they’ll form the corresponding perception. Guns are safe. Too much gun control is dangerous. Whereas people who’ve been raised in more communitarian communities will develop negative feelings toward guns. They’ll see them as evidence that people in the community are distrustful of each other. They’ll resent the idea that the public function of protection is taken by individuals who are supposed to do it for themselves. People who have an egalitarian sensibility, instead of valuing traditional roles like protector and father and hunter, might associate them with patriarchy or stereotypes that they think treat women unfairly, and they’ll develop a negative affective orientation toward the gun.” And once an opinion forms, information is screened to suit.