The Cultural Cognition of Risk

Human beings are famously bad at doing probability calculations, so it's not surprising to learn that people often have ideas about risk that don't necessarily stand up to scrutiny. But according to the Mechanisms of Cultural Cognition Project from National Science Foundation and the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at Yale Law School, there's a systematic valence to how we disagree about risk:

Individuals of diverse cultural outlooks–hierarchical and egalitarian, individualistic and communitarian–hold sharply opposed beliefs about a range of societal risks, including those associated with climate change, gun ownership, public health, and national security. Differences in these basic values exert substantially more influence over risk perceptions than does any other individual characteristic, including gender, race, socioeconomic status, education, and political ideology and party affiliation.

This is part of what makes politics so difficult. A hierarchical versus an egalitarian outlook have plenty of obvious political implications. Then layer different risk perceptions on top of that and it's extremely difficult to get agreement on anything. There's a ton of interesting stuff up on the website, including "Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect".