Pseudoexpertise: A Conceptual and Theoretical Analysis

Some people publicly pretend to be experts while not being ones. They are pseudoexperts, and their presence seems to be ubiquitous in the current cultural landscape. This manuscript explores the nature and mechanisms of pseudoexpertise. We first provide a conceptual analysis of pseudoexperts based on prototypical cases of pseudoexpertise and recent philosophical work on the concept of expertise. This allows us to propose a definition that captures real-world cases of pseudoexpertise, distinguishes it from related but different concepts such as pseudoscience, and highlights what is wrong with pseudoexpertise. Next, based on this conceptual analysis, we propose a framework for further research on pseudoexpertise, built on relevant empirical and theoretical approaches to cultural cognition. We provide exploratory answers to three questions: why is there pseudoexpertise at all; how can pseudoexperts be successful despite not being experts; and what becomes of pseudoexperts in the long run. Together, these conceptual and theoretical approaches to pseudoexpertise draw a preliminary framework from which to approach the very troubling problem posed by persons usurping the capacities and reputations of genuine experts.

Race, Evidence, and Epistemic Injustice

This chapter starts off with a definition of “racist evidence” that includes: (1) evidence that suggests one racial group is inferior to or superior to another racial group in any way, (2) products of structural racism, (3) racially disparate evidentiary burdens in proving one’s racialized reality, and (4) the ways that racism distorts observation, perception and—accordingly—belief, which is then utilized as a basis of proof in legal proceedings.” Based on this definition, the chapter identifies and analyzes the epistemic problems posed by racialized factfinding and relates them to the broader notion of cultural cognition. This discussion focuses on the epistemic failings of “racial character evidence” and the unequal evidentiary treatment of white—as opposed to Black and Brown—“racialized reality evidence,” especially on matters of structural racism and race relations with law enforcement. While white racialized reality evidence receives “implicit judicial notice” and is fast-tracked to the jury box, the racialized reality evidence of Black and Brown people is subject to the full rigors of evidentiary scrutiny and often times suppressed. This system results in apervasive type of epistemic injustice.

What Is Cultural Cognition, and Why Does It Matter?

By all accounts, we currently live in a polarized political state in which virtually every fact is contestable. From climate change to vaccine efficacy, people feel free to choose their own facts to support politically charged arguments. Partisans in every area of American life are unable to agree on the basic assumptions underlying political debate. Research on cultural cognition demonstrates that people's political and cultural commitments shape how they process information from news sources, scientists, and public officials, thereby dictating which policies they support and which ones they oppose. When partisan loyalties determine what evidence people will accept, political compromise becomes difficult or even impossible. All is not lost, however. Cultural cognition has a powerful influence, but facts are stubborn things. In some areas of public debate, facts and evidence have overcome political divides. Furthermore, an understanding of the influence of cultural cognition can facilitate remedies to partisanship. This article examines the research that demonstrates the extent of cultural influences on people's understanding of public debates, identifies the limits of cultural cognition, and describes the extent to which cultural cognition itself provides keys to breaking down partisan divides. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 17 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Infected by Bias: Behavioral Science and the Legal Response to COVID-19

This Article presents the first comprehensive analysis of the contribution of behavioral science to the legal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the descriptive level, the Article shows how different psychological phenomena such as loss aversion and cultural cognition influenced the way policymakers and the public perceived the pandemic, and how such phenomena affected the design of laws and regulations responding to COVID-19. At the normative level, the Article compares nudges (i.e., choice-preserving, behaviorally informed tools that encourage people to behave as desired) and mandates (i.e., obligations backed by sanctions that dictate to people how they must behave). The Article argues that mandates rather than nudges should serve in most cases as the primary legal tool used to regulate behavior during a pandemic. Nonetheless, this Article highlights ways in which nudges can complement mandates.

Cultural Cognition and Ideological Framing Influence Communication About Zoonotic Disease in the Era of COVID-19

The efficacy of science communication can be influenced by the cultural values and cognitions of target audiences, yet message framing rarely accounts for these cognitive factors. To explore the effects of message framing tailored to specific audiences, we investigated relationships between one form of cultural cognition—political ideology—and perceptions about the zoonotic origins of the COVID-19 pandemic using a nationally representative Qualtrics XM panel (n = 1,554) during August 2020. First, we examined differences in attitudes towards science (in general) and COVID-19 (specifically) based on political ideology. We found that, compared to conservatives and moderates, liberals trusted science more, were less skeptical of science, perceived greater risk from COVID-19, were more likely to believe in a wildlife origin of COVID-19, and were more likely to support restrictions on wildlife trade. Second, we examined the influence of cultural framing on the perceived validity of science related to COVID-19. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: 1) a technocratic framing that highlighted feats of human ingenuity to overcome zoonoses; 2) a regulatory framing that highlighted regulations and expansions of protected areas for wildlife as a means to prevent zoonoses, and 3) a control article about traffic lights with no cultural framing. After reading the initial framing article, all three groups read the same fictional, yet factually accurate, ‘Nature Science study’ generated by the authors. An OLS regression model revealed a significant interaction between the technocratic framing and political ideology. Relative to the control group, the technocratic framing slightly increased perceived validity of the Nature Science study for conservatives, significantly lowered perceived validity for liberals, and had no impact on moderates. We did not detect any significant interaction between framing and political ideology for the regulatory framing. Findings of this study highlight the need to account for cultural cognitions when communicating about COVID-19 and other zoonotic diseases. Communication strategies carefully designed to resonate with ideologically diverse audiences may ultimately lead to bipartisan support for actions required to promote “One Health” approaches that reduce the impacts of zoonoses on human and environmental health.

Language and cultural cognition

In this paper, we analyze a large-scale corpus of Arab cartoons to measure the correspondence between grammatical gender in Arabic and personified gender in images. The results show that the effect is very strong for males (a near-perfect relationship between the two, grammatical and visual depiction), but the reverse is the case for females (the grammatical description is almost the opposite in perceived meaning of the graphical depiction). It can be a substantive cartoon effect. That is, there is more ambiguity in images depicting females due to some implicit cultural effect (i.e., males/gendered maleness dominates even in the text in ‘male-centric’ cultures). We look at the implications of this androcentric behavior for understanding the complex set of relationships linking language, thought, and culture. Such research will aid both gender studies and cognition scholarship based on multimodal stimuli.

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.

Culture, Cognition, and Social Exchange: A Classic Case Study of Social Negotiation Network Dynamics

How do automatic vs. controlled, hot vs. cold, and agentic vs. communal facets of cultural cognition operate together in a perspective informed by social neuroscience? This question is explored by re-imagining Malinowski’s classic ethnographic case study of the Kula in light of a contemporary social exchange theory of negotiation networks. We propose: (1) sub-institutional patterns of power-dependence form a structural foundation for the rise of tacit meanings, which evolve through social negotiation into explicit, cultural meaning agreements; (2) crucial sub-cultural categories form around the pursuit of both agentic benefits and communal benefits; (3) an individual is culturally shaped through externalization, socialization, and internalization to value and be motivated to seek both kinds of benefits; (4) an individual faces the existential task of navigating both agentic and communal situations across the negotiation network; (5) the basic individual mechanism underlying such navigation entails motivated behavioral choice and motivated cultural cognition; (6) a behavioral choice rests on automatic, largely implicit and hot cognitive processing; (7) motivated cultural cognition rests mostly on the deliberate, mostly explicit, and cool selection of materials from the prevailing cultural toolkit for assembling a justification, but whose underlying trajectory is biased by an automatic, hot value-position, whether agentic or communal. Based on the analysis, some directions for future empirical research are suggested.