The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [36]
What is surprising is that in predicting how people around us will think about any given political, legal, or social question, their cultural values will often swamp other characteristics—such as race, gender, or class—that we tend to focus on more. This means that if you are an attorney for either side in a rape case, a sexual harassment case, or perhaps even in a sex discrimination case, and it is time to pick a jury, you should care more about the jurors’ cultural assumptions than their race or gender.
Kahan’s research also suggests that an individual’s views about a wide range of political and legal questions will be remarkably stable over time. Change will come when core values shift and evolve, but that kind of change generally occurs slowly, if at all. What’s worse, if Kahan is right, then the widespread assumption that people can be persuaded on the basis of facts—an assumption that underlies our belief in the importance of juries, legislative debate, scientific research, and books like the one in your hand—may be too optimistic. There may be little hope of changing people’s minds unless we change strongly held cultural values and assumptions. This is probably not done through factual argument.
I do not want to imply that culture is unchangeable. It certainly changes eventually—just ask my mother, or Barack Obama. And sometimes the courageous acts of individuals, such as Lubna Hussein in Khartoum or Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, can challenge the cultural norms around them. When culture does change, it evolves through the individual acts of scores, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people. Sometimes this evolution occurs steadily, if incrementally; sometimes the forces for change build up with little apparent effect, only to have the pressure hit a “tipping point” where the new norms cascade through society.19
But meanwhile, from the standpoint of most individuals, cultural influences are pervasive and overwhelming. Just ask the thirteen women flogged for wearing pants.
5.
Perhaps the most important lesson about the power of cultural norms and assumptions is personal. If culture really does influence us in ways we do not recognize, it is probably essential that we be skeptical of our own perceptions and opinions. We should ask of ourselves a bit of humility, especially when we think we are sure about something that draws on cultural predispositions (that is, concerning most things that people actually argue over). We should be willing to “check our work” by articulating our assumptions and values. And we should be understanding toward those who vehemently disagree with us.
I know this kind of humility is damned difficult. It is not natural, especially for professor types who have sufficiently inflated egos that they would write a book trying to persuade other people what to think. I am lucky to have a spouse who challenges many of my assumptions about gender roles. I am fortunate to have been able to travel in cultural settings other than my own. And I am lucky that my boyhood home town of Princeton, Kentucky, is sufficiently different from my current home town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I am sometimes culturally uncomfortable in both places, and that this discomfort forces me to recognize some of my own cultural assumptions.
But I am not setting myself up as anything more than a person with the same problem of cultural bias that you probably have. Like most people who will read this book, I have friends who share most of my values and essentially live in the same cultural group. I do not go out of my way to talk to people who disagree vehemently with me. Who needs the hassle?
But this insulation