Cultural Cognition and Group Belonging–Do We All Defend Our “Teams” With Equal Strength?

This is my second post about the Dan Kahan show, which  has just gone up at Point of Inquiry.

After my long post yesterday laying out the cultural cognition model, I wanted to bring up one point in particular that came up on the show.

Kahan’s cultural cognition model is at least in part about the power of group affiliation. It postulates that we want to affirm the values held in our communities about how society ought to be ordered, and that it is this sense of belonging that leads to motivated or biased reasoning about things that may threaten the group–like science.

But on the show, I pointed something out: Aren’t there reasons to question whether we all have an equal sense of group loyalty or belonging?

Jonathan Haidt, for instance, argues in his moral foundations theory that conservatives have stronger group or team loyalty instincts than do liberals. So this raises the possibility of an “asymmetry” in the strength of ties to the “group”–and indeed, my sense of liberals is that there is much more “herding cats” going on there than there is among conservatives.

I also pointed out in my latest Huffington Post piece that Democrats, or liberals, have much less loyalty to Obama than Tea Partiers have loyalty to….the cause of defeating Obama.

So could cultural cognition work differently based upon the strength of one’s sense of in-group/out-group morality? I think it could. To me, this is another reason to suspect an “asymmetry” in politically biased reasoning between left and right.

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