Culture and Identity‐Protective Cognition: Explaining the White‐Male Effect in Risk Perception

• Author: Dan M. Kahan,C. K. Mertz,John Gastil,Donald Braman,Paul Slovic
• Published date: 01 November 2007
• Date: 01 November 2007
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-1461.2007.00097.x

Culture and Identity-Protective

Cognition: Explaining the White-Male

Effect in Risk Perception

Dan M. Kahan, Donald Braman, John Gastil, Paul Slovic, and

C. K. Mertz*

Why do white men fear various risks less than women and minorities?

Known as the “white-male effect,” this pattern is well documented but

poorly understood. This article proposes a new explanation: identity-

protective cognition. Putting work on the cultural theory of risk together

with work on motivated cognition in social psychology suggests that indi-

viduals selectively credit and dismiss asserted dangers in a manner support-

ive of their cultural identities. This dynamic, it is hypothesized, drives the

white-male effect, which reflects the risk skepticism that hierarchical and

individualistic white males display when activities integral to their cultural

identities are challenged as harmful. The article presents the results of an

1,800-person study that confirmed that cultural worldviews interact with

the impact of gender and race on risk perception in patterns that suggest

cultural-identity-protective cognition. It also discusses the implications of

these findings for risk regulation and communication.

Fear discriminates. Numerous studies show that risk perceptions are skewed

across gender and race: women worry more than men, and minorities

more than whites, about myriad dangers—from environmental pollution to

*Address correspondence to Dan M. Kahan, Yale Law School, PO Box 208215, New Haven, CT

06520; email: dan.kahan@yale.edu. Kahan is at Yale Law School; Braman is at George Wash-

ington Law School; Gastil is at the University of Washington, Department of Communications;

Slovic is at the University of Oregon, Department of Psychology, and Decision Research; Mertz

is with Decision Research.

Research for this article was funded by National Science Foundation Grant SES-0242106. We

are grateful to Paul von Hippel for advice on data imputation; to Geoffrey Cohen for comments

on an earlier draft; and to John Darley, Don Green, Paul Sniderman, and Christopher Winship

for their invaluable guidance as members of our study advisory panel. Most of all, we are

indebted to the late Mary Douglas for inspiration and for supportive, albeit often painfully

direct, counsel on our research methods.

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

Volume 4, Issue 3, 465–505, November 2007

©2007, Copyright the Authors

Journal compilation ©2007, Cornell Law School and Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

465

handguns, from blood transfusions to red meat (Bord & O’Connor 1997;

Brody 1984; Davidson & Freudenburg 1996; Flynn et al. 1994; Gutteling &

Wiegman 1993; Jones 1998; Kalof et al. 2002; Mohai & Bryant 1998;

Satterfield et al. 2004; Steger & Witt 1989; Stern et al. 1993).

To date, no compelling account has been offered of why risk percep-

tions vary in this way. It is not convincing to suggest that women and minori-

ties have less access to, or understanding of, scientific information about risk.

Gender and race differences persist even after controlling for education.

Indeed, gender variance exists even among scientists who specialize in risk

assessment (Barke et al. 1997; Kraus et al. 1992; Slovic 1999).

Also unsatisfying is the suggestion that women are more sensitive to risk

because of their role as caregivers. This argument not only fails to explain

variance across race, but also cannot account for the relative uniformity of

risk assessments among women and African-American men, who presumably

are no more socially or biologically disposed to be caring than are white men

(Flynn et al. 1994).

Women and African Americans feel less politically empowered than

white men and have less confidence in government authorities. These per-

ceptions might incline them to feel more vulnerable to dangers generally.

Research shows that such attitudes do play a role, but that both gender and

race continue to predict risk perceptions even after these factors are taken

into account (Satterfield et al. 2004).

In this article, we consider a new explanation. Previous studies have

found that race and gender differences in risk perception can be attributed

to a discrete class of highly risk-skeptical white men (Flynn et al. 1994). The

distorting influence of this seemingly fearless group of men on the distribu-

tion of risk perceptions has been referred to as the “white-male effect”

(Finucane et al. 2000b). Research also has shown that these men are more

likely to hold certain anti-egalitarian and individualistic attitudes than

members of the general population (Finucane et al. 2000b; Palmer 2003).

This finding suggests that the white-male effect might derive from a conge-

niality between hierarchical and individualistic worldviews, on the one hand,

and a posture of extreme risk skepticism, on the other.

We designed a study to test this hypothesis. Our findings strongly

support the conclusion that the white-male effect is an artifact of variance in

cultural worldviews. Across various types of hazards, gender and race per se

did not influence risk perception among the members of our large and

broadly representative sample. Rather, these characteristics influenced risk

perception only in conjunction with distinctive worldviews that themselves

466 Kahan et al.

feature either gender or race differentiation or both in social roles involving

putatively dangerous activities.

Indeed, the results of this study complicate the conventional account of

who is best described as fearful and who fearless in this setting. We find that

individuals are disposed selectively to accept or dismiss risk claims in a

manner that expresses their cultural values. It is natural for individuals to

adopt a posture of extreme skepticism, in particular when charges of societal

danger are leveled at activities integral to social roles constructed by their

cultural commitments. The insensitivity to risk reflected in the white-male

effect can thus be seen as a defensive response to a form of cultural identity

threat that afflicts hierarchical and individualistic white males.

But white individualistic and hierarchical males are by no means

uniquely vulnerable to this condition. Other groups, including women and

African Americans as well as white men holding egalitarian and communi-

tarian worldviews, also face cultural-identity threats that generate distinctive

patterns of risk perception. Indeed, the impact of risk regulation on com-

peting understandings of culture and identity helps explain why the highly

technical problems this body of law addresses tend to provoke such

impassioned and divisive political conflict (Slovic 1999).

Our study makes it possible to chart the impact of culturally grounded

identity threats on a variety of risk perceptions. We begin in Section I with

a discussion of the theory that informs the study. In Section II, we present a

description of the study design, and in Section III a detailed description of its

results. In Section IV, we summarize our principal findings and discuss their

implications for the study of risk perception and the regulation of risk.

Section V concludes.

I. Theoretical Background:Culture,Risk,and

Identity Threat

We propose that variance in risk perceptions—across persons generally, and

across race and gender in particular—reflects a form of motivated cognition

through which people seek to deflect threats to identities they hold, and

roles they occupy, by virtue of contested cultural norms. This proposition

derives from the convergence of two sets of theories, one relating to the

impact of culture on risk perception and the other on the influence of group

membership on cognition.

Explaining the White-Male Effect in Risk Perception 467