Cultural Cognition and Public Policy.

Why this matters here

Kahan’s “Cultural Cognition and Public Policy” argues that people process policy-relevant facts through cultural meaning—identity-protective cognition that makes being right feel continuous with being good. After Certainty cites that mechanism for why adults defend the social meaning attached to ideas as correctness becomes expensive to revise in public. Kahan explains culturally motivated cognition; the book asks what happens when institutions reward legible certainty and communities harden past commitments.