More statistics, less persuasion: a cultural theory of gun-risk perceptions.

• Author: Kahan, Dan M.

What motivates individuals to support or oppose the legal regulation of guns ? What sorts of evidence or arguments are likely to promote a resolution of the gun control debate? Using the survey methods associated with the cultural theory of risk, we demonstrate that individuals' positions on gun control derive from their cultural worldviews: individuals of an egalitarian or solidaristic orientation tend to support gun control; those of a hierarchical or individualist orientation to oppose it. Indeed, cultural orientations so defined are stronger predictors of individuals' positions than is any other fact about them, including whether they are male or female, white or black, southerners or easterners, urbanites or country dwellers, conservatives or liberals. The role of culture in determining attitudes toward guns suggests that empirical analyses of the effect of gun control on violent crime are unlikely to have much impact. As they do when they are evaluating empirical evidence of environmental and other types of risks, individuals can be expected to credit or dismiss empirical evidence on "gun control risks" depending on whether it coheres or conflicts with their cultural values. Rather than focusing on quantifying the impact of gun control laws on crime, then, academics and others who want to contribute to resolving the gun debate should dedicate themselves to constructing a new expressive idiom that will allow citizens to debate the cultural issues that divide them in an open and constructive way.

INTRODUCTION

Few issues divide the American polity as dramatically as gun control. Framed by assassinations, mass shootings, and violent crime, the gun debate feeds on our deepest national anxieties. Pitting women against men, blacks against whites, suburban against rural, Northeast against South and West, Protestants against Catholics and Jews, the gun question reinforces the most volatile sources of factionalization in our political life. Pro- and anticontrol forces spend millions of dollars to influence the votes of legislators and the outcomes of popular elections. Yet we are no closer to achieving consensus on the major issues today than we were ten, thirty, or even eighty years ago.

Admirably, economists and other empirical social scientists have dedicated themselves to freeing us from this state of perpetual contestation. Shorn of its emotional trappings, the gun debate, they reason, comes down to a straightforward question of fact: do more guns make society less safe or more? (1) Control supporters take the position that the ready availability of guns diminishes public safety by facilitating violent crimes and accidental shootings; opponents take the position that such availability enhances public safety by enabling potential crime victims to ward off violent predation. Both sides believe that "only empirical research can hope to resolve which of the[se] ... possible effects ... dominate[s]." (2) Accordingly, social scientists have attacked the gun issue with a variety of empirical methods--from multivariate regression models (3) to contingent valuation studies (4) to public-health risk-factor analyses. (5)

Evaluated in its own idiom, however, this prodigious investment of intellectual capital has yielded only meager practical dividends. As high-quality studies of the consequences of gun control accumulate in number, gun control politics rage on with unabated intensity. Indeed, in the 2000 election, their respective support for and opposition to gun control may well have cost Democrats the White House and Republicans control of the U.S. Senate. (6)

Perhaps empirical social science has failed to quiet public disagreement over gun control because empirical social scientists have not yet reached their own consensus on what the consequences of gun control really are. If so, then the right course for academics who want to make a positive contribution to resolving the gun control debate would be to stay the course--to continue devoting their energy, time, and creativity to the project of quantifying the impact of various gun control measures.

But another possibility is that by focusing on consequences narrowly conceived, empirical social scientists just aren't addressing what members of the public really care about. Guns, historians and sociologists tell us, are not just "weapons, [or] pieces of sporting equipment"; they are also symbols "positively or negatively associated with Daniel Boone, the Civil War, the elemental lifestyles [of] the frontier, war in general, crime, masculinity in the abstract, adventure, civic responsibility or irresponsibility, [and] slavery or freedom." (7) It stands to reason, then, that how an individual feels about gun control will depend a lot on the social meanings that she thinks guns and gun control express, and not just on the consequences she believes they impose. (8) As one southern Democratic senator recently put it, the gun debate is "about values"--" about who you are and who you aren't." (9) Or in the even more pithy formulation of another group of politically minded commentators, "It's the Culture, Stupid!" (10)

This view, if correct, has important practical implications for the gun debate. If individuals adopt one position or another because of what guns mean rather than what guns do, then empirical data are unlikely to have much effect on the gun debate. Instead of continuing to focus on the consequences of various types of regulation, academics and others who want to help resolve the gun controversy should dedicate themselves to identifying with as much precision as possible the cultural visions that animate this dispute, and to formulating appropriate strategies for enabling those visions to be expressively reconciled in law.

In this respect, we believe that the academic study of gun control stands to benefit from an alliance with the academic study of risk perception. Members of the public disagree strongly with experts and with one another about the magnitude of various societal risks, from environmental catastrophe to foreign invasion to economic collapse. Through sophisticated survey instruments, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists have documented the impact that differences in moral attitudes and cultural orientations have in shaping individuals' perceptions of these kinds of risks. The resulting cultural theory of risk, (11) moreover, has important implications for what must be done--and in particular, what must be said by citizens to one another--in order for such disputes to be definitively settled. (12)

Our goal in this Article is to bring the tools of the cultural theory of risk to bear on the gun control controversy. Part I furnishes an overview of the cultural theory of risk. Part II applies the theory to gun control. In addition to reviewing the fit between the cultural theory and existing literature on public opinion toward guns, we present the results of an original empirical study that demonstrates that attitudes toward gun control do in fact bear the relationship to cultural orientations posited by cultural theory. Part III spells out the implications of this finding for the kinds of arguments and evidence that are likely to matter in the gun control debate. In Part IV, we conclude with an exhortation to academics to apply themselves to the creation of a new expressive idiom, one designed to accommodate respectful cultural deliberations over gun control.

1. THE CULTURAL THEORY OF RISK

   Anthropologists, sociologists, and social psychologists have long been interested in the puzzling diversity of risk evaluations. Why might an individual act in an apparently risk-preferring manner in one setting--say, by climbing mountains for recreation--but in a risk-averse manner--investing all of her retirement funds in money-market certificates rather than in stocks--in another? Why do different individuals attach radically different evaluations to different societal risks--of, say, a nuclear accident, a foreign war, or the collapse of financial markets?

   The answer--or at least one powerful answer--is the complexity and diversity of social norms. Contrary to what rational choice economics assumes, individuals do not have generic attitudes toward risky activities, but instead evaluate them according to context-specific norms that determine what risk taking connotes about their values and attitudes. So a person may climb mountains on the weekends to demonstrate (to herself and to others) that she possesses courage and physical discipline, and invest her retirement funds in money-market certificates to demonstrate that she is prudent, responsible, and forward-looking. (13)

   Insofar as societies are often the sites of competing norms, moreover, we should expect systematic variation in--and consequently dispute over--public risk assessments. Acceptance of the risks incident to nuclear power, for example, might signal confidence in governmental and scientific authority, man's mastery over his environment, and the feasibility of unimpeded private commerce to one group of citizens while signifying collective hubris, disrespect for the sacredness of nature, and generational selfishness to another. (14)

   The cultural theory of risk, associated most famously with the work of Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, (15) systematizes the relationship between risk evaluation, social norms, and political conflict. That theory sees attitudes toward risk as derivative of social norms. Irrespective of what they believe about the actuarial magnitudes of various risks, individuals routinely choose to accept some and avoid others because they believe it would be dishonorable or cowardly or selfish or base to do otherwise. (16) To the extent that individuals self-consciously rely on these norm-pervaded evaluations, their attitudes toward risk can be said to be morally derivative of social norms.

   But risk perception can be cognitively derivative of social norms as...