Cultural Evaluations of Risk: "Values" or "Blunders"?

Dan M. Kahan & Paul Slovic

Responding to Cass R. Sunstein, Misfearing: A Reply, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 1110 (2006)

What are the respective contributions of culture and rationality to risk perception? Do disagreements between lay persons and experts (and among members of both groups) originate in conflicting values, differing abilities to comprehend technical information, or both? If conflicting values do play a role, should the law be responsive to popular perceptions of risk even when expert regulators believe that popular beliefs are wrong? These are the central questions in the debate between Professor Sunstein and us. We take the position that cultural worldviews pervade popular (not to mention expert) risk assessments and that a genuine commitment to democracy forbids simply dismissing such perceptions as products of “bounded rationality.” Sunstein disagrees. The critical import of Sunstein’s arguments notwithstanding, we are grateful for his thoughtful reply to our review essay. We now respond to two of Sunstein’s criticisms, one methodological and the other substantive.

119 Harv. L. Rev. F. 166 (2006) | DOWNLOAD PDF

Freeing Employee Choice: The Case For Secrecy in Union Organizing and Voting

Cynthia Estlund :: In his article Enabling Employee Choice, Professor Benjamin Sachs provided a nuanced analysis of what is wrong both with current law and with the leading reform proposal. In this response, Professor Cynthia Estlund argues that Professor Sachs’s reform proposal is likely to set the terms for future scholarly analysis and for serious public debate over the role of law in union organizing regardless of the fate of labor law reform in the current Congress. READ MORE

Not All Statistics Are Created Equal

D. James Greiner :: In Statistics Is a Plural Word, a response to my article Causal Inference in Civil Rights Litigation, Dean Steven Willborn and Professor Ramona Paetzold take issue both with my critique of regression as it is currently used in civil rights litigation and with my advocacy of the potential outcomes framework. In this Reply, I argue that Dean Willborn and Professor Paetzold’s response does not address (and thus cannot refute) the central lessons of Causal Inference, despite purporting to agree with those lessons. In particular, after “agree[ing] wholeheartedly” that a definition of a causal effect is necessary for the use of statistics in civil rights, Plural does not offer a definition. In the absence of such a definition, the purpose of statistics in civil rights litigation is unclear. The potential outcomes framework, in contrast, provides the needed definition and clarifies many subsidiary concepts, with salutary consequences following naturally from a start in the right place. READ MORE

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