The Cultural Cognition Project - The Yale Law School

The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities. Project members are using the methods of various disciplines -- including social psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science -- to chart the impact of this phenomenon and to identify the mechanisms through which it operates. The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify processes of democratic decisionmaking by which society can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks and consistent with sound public policymaking.

Click here to see examples of CCP studies and research projects.

The Paradox of Choice and Why It Aids The Increase in Anxiety and Guilt - Renata Salercl

Renata Salecl is Centennial Professor at the department of law at the London School of Economics, Visiting Humanities Professor at George Washington University in Washington, DC, Visiting Professor at Duke University in Durham, NC and Fellow at Remarque Institute at NYU.She is currently working on a book Tyranny of Choice, which analyses why late capitalist insistence on choice increases feeling of anxiety and guilt.

The Power of the Poor

A short video about those peoples in the world who have to operate in the extra-legal economy because they simply cannot afford normal legal services, These people daily globally enact constracts, borrow money and sell goods yet do so without any system of justice to enforce commercial understandings. They are the poor peoples of the world, they are the fasting growing entrepreneurial class and they are a large market  the developed western economies cannot do without.