Data Skeptic

In this episode, our guest is Dan Kahan about his research into how people consume and interpret science news. In an era of fake news, motivated reasoning, and alternative facts, important questions need to be asked about how people understand new information. Dan is a member of the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale University, a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. In a paper titled Cultural cognition of scientific consensus, Dan and co-authors Hank Jenkins‐Smith and Donald Braman discuss the "cultural cognition of risk" and establish experimentally that individuals tend to update their beliefs about scientific information through a context of their pre-existing cultural beliefs. In this way, topics such as climate change, nuclear power, and conceal-carry handgun permits often result in people. The findings of this and other studies tell us that on topics such as these, even when people are given proper information about a sci