What the evidence shows

This study investigates why public disagreement over issues with strong scientific consensus — climate change, nuclear waste disposal, and concealed-handgun laws — persists despite that consensus. Rather than attributing the gap to public ignorance or media distortion, the authors test whether "cultural cognition" causes people to form different perceptions of what scientists believe in the first place, filtered through their own values.

The study has two parts. The correlational part asked 1,500 U.S. adults whether they believed "most expert scientists agree," "disagree," or are "divided" on four factual statements, and compared those answers to each subject's position on two cultural-worldview scales (Hierarchy–Egalitarianism and Individualism–Communitarianism). The experimental part showed subjects a fictional, credentialed scientist (member of the National Academy of Sciences) and randomly assigned that scientist a "high risk" or "low risk" position on the same three issues, then asked whether subjects considered the person a trustworthy expert.

The approach is squarely psychological/political-science research, not communications testing — it does not test messages, framings, or campaigns. Its relevance to Understories is diagnostic: it explains why audiences reject accurate scientific information, which is foundational to designing messages that don't trigger identity-protective rejection.

Key Findings

• Cultural worldview strongly predicted perceptions of scientific consensus on climate change: hierarchical-individualists were 56.9 percentage points less likely than egalitarian-communitarians to believe "most expert scientists agree" that global temperatures are rising, and 59.2 points less likely to believe scientists agree humans are causing it.

• In the experiment, when a credentialed expert was assigned the "high risk" position on climate change, 88% of egalitarian-communitarians rated him a trustworthy expert versus only 23% of hierarchical-individualists; the pattern reversed (86% vs. 47%) when the same expert was assigned the "low risk" position — a roughly 50-percentage-point swing in relative credibility driven purely by the position attributed to him, not his credentials.

• The effect held, at smaller magnitude, even for nuclear waste disposal, an issue with less contemporary political salience: hierarchical-individualists were 12.6 points more likely to believe scientists agree deep geologic storage is safe, and their expert-credibility swing was 31.1 vs. 21.5 percentage points depending on assigned position.

Standout data points

• 59.2 points: gap between egalitarian-communitarians and hierarchical-individualists in likelihood of believing scientists agree humans cause global warming.

• 40% "divided": share of the full 1,500-person sample who believed scientists are divided on whether humans cause global warming, even though a National Academy of Sciences report had endorsed that position.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Credibility Demonstrates that perceived source credibility is contingent on the position a source takes relative to the audience's values, not on credentials alone — directly relevant to scoring whether a message's chosen messengers will be trusted by its intended audience.

• Personal relevance Cultural-identity fit functions as a proxy for personal relevance — messages that threaten a group's values will be discounted regardless of factual accuracy.

• Accountability This is a 2009-fielded, 2011-published study; the political salience and partisan sorting of climate change in the U.S. has intensified since then. The core psychological mechanism (cultural cognition) is likely durable, but the magnitude of effects should be treated as dated and revisited against more recent replications before being used to calibrate precise scores.

• Explainability Findings are highly specific (percentage-point effects, regression coefficients, confidence intervals) and support scored, cited recommendations about messenger/audience fit — though the paper stops short of testing which specific messaging tactics work, so citations should be scoped to the diagnostic finding, not overextended into tactical prescriptions the study didn't test.

  — non-exhaustive.

Key quote

On the psychological mechanism, the authors note that culturally aligned sources "will be overrepresented in individuals' mental inventories of experts."

© Taylor & Francis, 2011 — All rights reserved.

Last update: 15 September 2026

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