Susan Bandes on "Emotions, Values, and the Construction of Risk"

The University of Pennsylvania Law Review's PENNumbra site has published a response by Visiting Professor of Law Susan Bandes to "Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation," a recent article by Dan M. Kahan. Kahan's article is itself part of a longer debate with Cass Sunstein; with this response, Bandes enters the discussion. She writes: 

Are emotions subversive of reason or essential constituents of it?  This is the broad question posed by Dan M. Kahan in Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation, a welcome addition to his ongoing inquiry into how emotional appraisals of value influence decision making. Much of Kahan’s recent work has focused on a particular aspect of policymaking: the study of risk perception. Two Conceptions continues a useful exchange between Kahan and Cass Sunstein about the differences between their prominent approaches to risk regulation: Kahan’s cultural cognition approach and Sunstein’s heuristics and biases approach, which focuses on the cognitive mechanisms that shape perceptions about risk. Kahan illuminates the issues at stake with his customary passion and clarity.

A major contribution of Kahan’s work has been its insight into the pervasiveness of emotional influences on the decision-making process. The recognition that emotion pervades decision making raises a difficult normative question: how to distinguish the influences that contribute to good judgment from those that distort judgment. This normative question in turn gives rise to a difficult practical question: how to address the influences that cause distortion. In this brief Response, I argue that tackling this evaluative task requires avoiding mirror impulses: emotions should neither be privileged as inherently desirable nor marginalized as inherently irrational. They should be judged based on what they contribute to the cognitive task at hand.

The task at hand, as the Kahan/Sunstein debate defines it, is determining how government should regulate risk. In exploring the question of how this task is best approached, I will also raise a question about how it is defined. I suggest that the very act of framing issues of government policy in terms of risk regulation reflects certain assumptions about how issues present themselves and what sorts of cognitive processes might be required to address them.

Comments

[Uzair Kayani]

Hi Professor Bandes,

These are very interesting papers. I see three prominent veiwpoints (ignoring the rational weigher):

(1) Emotions reflecting cognitive biases: that emotions are baises that skew risk cognition, so that risk control should be entrusted to experts who are less susceptible to emotions;

(2) Emotions reflecting static cultural values: that emotions constitute (or reflect) social identity, and in a participatory democracy, the society's identity (that is, in part, its emotions) must inform its risk control choices (maybe "framing the argument" is a way of avoiding conflicts between societal identity and optimal risk perception);

(3) Emotions reflecting dynamic values: that even if emotions constitute social identity, that identity is shifting rather than static, so that framing arguments to avoid society-wide emotional conflicts is short-sighted. Experts will do what they can for now and society's identity will change from time to time, through a free exchange of ideas.

I'm not sure what role "participatory democracy" plays here. Experts aren't really anti-democratic (see appointment and removal powers, inter alia). Conversely, "framing" risk cognition for the public isn't particularly democratic (someone has to do the framing).

Also, the point of devices like republican government, bicameralism, life tenure, and age restrictions for officeholders is to restrict emotional or other factional influences (see, e.g., Fed 10). When we are so skeptical of "passions" in devising a form of government, why would we be so open to them when it comes to risk cognition?

[Joan A. Conway]

Participatory Democracy is the development, intervention, evolution, and integration of farmers and/or freed slaves, and farmers/peasants, into national life as a goal of the American Revolution.

Family bonds based on blood had to give way to a new value system that demanded a split between their emotions and ability to labor with strangers.

The freed slave and farmer began to want the social advantages and physical improvements identified with technology, schools, roads, electricity, health facilities, all things he can be by manipulating the political process. Some by migrating to the North from the South, and some by moving to the cities from the farms and rural countryside.

As the farmers and/or freed slaves had their general wants satisfied, they began to organize more specialized functional interest associations to accomplish the particular goals which they as individuals or specific members of the political society may desire, as opposed to the specialized goals of their neighbors.

This assimilation of the farmer and/or freed slave into national life made him aware of the possibilities of government aid because of his lack of opportunities to share work, educational, sports, and even religious experiences with another farmer and/or freed slave.

Emotions would hold them back from the development of man into a participatory demoncracy based on their personal biases and fear of strangers.