Cultural Values & Public Risk Perception

Please see this provocative post by Dan Kahan at Balkinization "Cultural Advocacy and the HPV Vaccine:

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/10/cultural-advocacy-of-hpv-vaccine.html

The specific study is used to make a broader point about

"what makes ordinary people find experts credible: an affinity between the experts’ perceived cultural values and their own. This finding too shouldn't come as a shock, yet it's a truth that is consistently missed by many public policy advocates, who tend to assume that all they need to do to persuade the public on some risk issue (global warming, gun control, etc.) is amass reams of evidence from people whose authority derives solely from their technical training and expertise.

If those advocates make that same mistake here -- if they don’t take care to assure that public advocates in the HPV vaccine debate are perceived as having appropriate cultural credentials as well as appropriate scientific ones -- they’ll likely be left scratching their heads in bewilderment, and stomping their feet in frustration, once again as their message fails to get through."

Comments

[Daniel Goldberg]

This is a good point, and it also speaks to the importance of rhetoric: identifying the particular modalities of persuasion that are likely to be effective. Many (erroneously) believe that discursive argument and logic defines persuasion, but this is not the case, IMO. You can have all the scientific credentials in the world, but if you do not speak the language (understood in the Quinean/Davidsonian sense) your advocacy is unlikely to be effective.

This is another reason I suspect the medical humanities is much, much more important as a modality for thinking about public health policy than many have previously considered. It is a possibility I am literally trying to put into practice on a daily basis.