The Role of Cognition in the Development of Social Fragmentation, Commonalities, and Consensus

The Role of Cognition in the Development of Social Fragmentation, Commonalities, and ConsensusSES - 1059748Penny Edgell, Kathleen E. HullUniversity of Minnesota ? Twin CitiesAbstractWe will pose and answer three primary research questions: 1) How do Americans evaluate competing or divergent expert discourses based in science, law and religion? 2) What other resources (e.g. personal experiences or metaphors) do people draw on to interpret competing arguments? and 3) What solutions or ways forward do people envision, if any? Our data will come from a national multi-site qualitative study. In each site, focus groups will discuss vignettes describing three ethically complex topics: faith-based prison programs, parental refusal of medical treatment, and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Pre- and post-focus group interviews with a small sample of respondents will allow us to assess how participants? views evolve due to focus group participation. Focus groups will be stratified by religious orientation and social class, and we will recruit participants to achieve diversity on age, gender, and race/ethnicity. Broader ImpactsOur main objective is to analyze how Americans respond to topics in which legal, scientific, and religious experts propose different policies, make competing claims on public resources, and receive widespread media coverage for their divergent views. We aim to provide alternative conceptual tools which can potentially affect public discourse so that it takes into account the views of a wide variety of stakeholders among the American public. This may help address recent concerns about how to engage respectfully in public discourse. The scientific value of the project is related to its design, which will let us pinpoint the cultural references that shape how ordinary citizens think and talk about complex issues, and specify the basis for both ?automatic cognition? (the initial or ?blink? reaction) and ?deliberate cognition? (cooler and more rational second-order cognition). Thus, the project will identify sources of social fragmentation, as well as sources of commonality and consensus that shape public discourse.