Climate Change and Cultural Cognition

How should we form beliefs concerning global climate change? For most of us, directly evaluating the evidence isn’t feasible; we lack expertise. So, any rational beliefs we form will have to be based in part on deference to those who have it. But in this domain, questions about how to identify experts can be fraught. This chapter discusses a partial answer to the question of how we in fact identify experts: Dan Kahan’s cultural cognition thesis, according to which we treat experts on factual questions of political import only insofar as they share our moral and cultural values. The chapter then poses some normative questions about cultural cognition: is it a species of irrationality that must be overcome if we are to communicate scientific results effectively, or is it instead an inescapable part of rational belief management? Ultimately, it is argued that cultural cognition is substantively unreasonable, though not formally irrational.