Culture counts!
New developments in understanding how and why culture varies as much and as little as it does,
how it achieves its effects on attitudes and decisions, and how to measure and model it
UCL Department of Anthropology
Sixth annual Mary Douglas seminar
for researchers interested in developing and applying the legacy of
the late Professor Dame Mary Douglas
afternoon of Thursday 4th June, 13.00-17.30pm and morning of Friday 5th June 2015,
9.00am-13.30pm
Rm 106, Gordon House, 29 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PP
Nearest tube stations: Euston, King’s Cross-St Pancras, Russell Square; Euston Square
For links to maps showing the location of the building, see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/estates/roombooking/buildinglocation/?id=088 or see the UCL campus map at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps/downloads/campus-map2012.pdf and scroll down to Map 2 at the bottom of the document and look for Gordon House on borderline
between cells E3 and E4.
To reserve a place, please e-mail Catherine Darlington [catherine.darlington@brunel.ac.uk]. To
cover refreshments on arrival, mid-morning and mid-afternoon, a charge of £10.00 is payable. For
those with UK bank accounts, payment is requested in advance by cheque in sterling, made out
to ‘The Mary Douglas Seminar’. The cheque should be sent by post to Catherine Darlington,
261 Tolcarne Drive, Pinner, Middlesex, HA5 2DW, United Kingdom, with a covering note. Those
attending from outside the UK may pay in cash on the day of the seminar, because we are unable
to accept cheques in other currencies.
If there are graduate students from universities within the UK but outside London who would
like to attend the seminar, but who find themselves unable to obtain financial assistance from their
schools or departments with the cost of travel, we shall be able to assist up to two people in this
situation with the cost of a standard class return train fare to London on days which will enable
them to attend the seminar. Application should be made by email to Perri 6, Professor in Public
Management, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London,
P.6@qmul.ac.uk, together with a letter from the head of school or department explaining why the
graduate student’s request for assistance to their own school could not be met.
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The Mary Douglas seminar takes place on the days immediately after the second Mary Douglas
Memorial Lecture. The lecture will take place at St Anne’s College Oxford, Woodstock Road,
Oxford, OX2 6HS (http://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/home) on Wednesday 3rd June 2015, starting
between 5.00pm and 6.00pm and followed by a reception. The lecture will be given by Professor
Jeffrey Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the
Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Colleagues will therefore be able to attend both
the lecture and the seminar. The timetables allow enough time both those who prefer to stay in
Oxford on 3rd June and travel to London on the morning of 4th June for the seminar and for those
who prefer to take the one hour train journey from Oxford to London Paddington on the evening
of 3rd June to stay in London before the seminar (suggested direct trains: 20.01-20.59, 20.31-21.33,
21.01-22.00, 21.32-22.43: see www.thetrainline.com).
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Seminar programme
programme
Thursday 4th June
13.00. Coffee, tea
13.30. Welcome, introductions, news and information exchange
Chair: Perri 6, Professor in Public Management, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary
University of London
14.00-14.45. Grid, group and grade: challenges in operationalising cultural theory for crossnational research
Ammar Maleki doctoral candidate, School of Politics and Public Administration, University of
Tilburg
and Frank Hendriks
Professor of Comparative Governance, School of Politics and Public Administration, co-director
of Demos Centre for Better Governance and Citizenship, University of Tilburg
14.45-15.00. Discussant: Dr Tom Entwistle, Reader in Public Policy and Management, Cardiff
Business School, Cardiff University
15.00-15.30. Q and A
15.30-15.45. break: coffee, tea, fruit juice, water
15.45-16.15. Chair: Albert Baumgarten, Professor Emeritus of Jewish History, Department of Jewish
History, Bar-Ilan University
Can ‘cultural cognition’ help solve CTR’s ‘mechanisms problem’?
Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology, Yale University
16.15-16.30. Discussant: Steve Rayner, James Martin Professor of Science and Civilization and
Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS), School of Anthropology and
Museum Ethnography, Oxford University
16.30-17.00. Q and A
Friday 5th June
9.00-9.30. Coffee, tea
Chair: Perri 6, Professor in Public Management, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary
University of London
9.30-10.15. Why four types of players? And how they fare in a massively multiplayer game
of life
Susanne Lohmann, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the Jacob
Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences at the
University of California, Los Angeles
10.15-1030 Discussant: Professor Stephen Lloyd Smith, Brunel Business School
10.30-11.00 Q and A
10.00- 11.15 break: coffee, tea, fruit juice, water
11.15-12.00. Cultural orientations and coupled human and natural systems: the role of CT
in shaping signals within coupled systems
Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, Professor, Political Science and Associate Director, Centre for Applied
Social Research, University of Oklahoma
Carol Silva, Associate Professor of Political Science; Director, Centre for Risk and Crisis
Management, University of Oklahoma
and Joseph Ripberger, Deputy Director for Research, Centre for Risk and Crisis Management,
University of Oklahoma; Research Scientist, Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological
Studies (CIMMS)
12.00-12.15. Discussant: Martin Lodge, Professor of Political Science & Public Policy,
Department of Government & Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation, London School of
Economics and Political Science
12.15-13.00. Q and A
13.00. Close and farewell
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Abstracts of papers
Thursday 4th June
Grid, group and grade: challenges in operationalising cultural theory for cross-national
research
Ammar Maleki, doctoral candidate, School of Politics and Public Administration, University of Tilburg
and
Frank Hendriks, Professor of Comparative Governance, School of Politics and Public Administration, codirector of Demos Centre for Better Governance and Citizenship, University of Tilburg
Grid–Group Cultural Theory (CT), developed by Mary Douglas and followers, is a well-known
and often-used framework for the analysis of culture in the political–administrative world. Douglas
was keen to see the theory operationalised, but sceptical about the construct validity of some of
the designs for operationalising it which were developed in the 1990s. Many scholars have tried to
measure Grid and Group and tested implications of the theory along these dimensions at different
levels of analysis, within or between nations. In this article, we recognise and discuss some grave
challenges surrounding the operationalisation of Grid and Group, particularly at the cross-national
level. Presenting distinct facets of Group and Grid, we debate that in some measurements,
divergent and unrelated cultural attributes are used in the operationalisation of Grid and Group,
making validity and reliability of such operationalisation problematic. We also exhibit that Grid
and Group cannot cover some cultural variances between or within societies; hence, we introduce
and elaborate on a third dimension – namely, “Grade”. We demonstrate that this dimension is
missing and much-needed in CT.
Can ‘cultural cognition’ help solve CTR’s ‘mechanisms problem’?
Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology, Yale University
My paper will address the contribution ‘cultural cognition’ makes to remedying a deficit in Cultural
Theory relating to the psychological and behavioural mechanisms that connect cultural worldviews
to individual risk perceptions. Indeed, ‘cultural cognition’ was self-consciously designed to forge
the connection between the cultural and psychometric theories of risk that Douglas (1997)
proposed in her essay, ‘The Depoliticisation of Risk.’ Prepared specifically for the conference, my
paper will use this theme to animate a brief survey of ‘cultural cognition’ studies. It will also present
new data suggesting how cultural cognition dynamics might be understood to support the so-called
‘mobility thesis’ (Rayner 1992), which sees institutions (or social contexts more generally) rather
than individuals as the agents through which opposing worldviews operate to generate variance in
risk perceptions. ‘Cultural cognition’ does not furnish a unique solution to Cultural Theory’s
‘mechanisms problem’; but without a solution, Cultural Theory, I will argue, cannot be expected
to sustain a meaningful empirical research program for investigating societal conflict over risk.
References
Douglas M, 1997, The depoliticisation of risk, in Ellis RJ and Thompson M, eds, 1997, Culture
matters: essays in honour of Aaron Wildavsky, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 121-132.
Rayner S, 1992, Cultural theory and risk analysis in Krimsky S and Golding D, eds, 1992, Social
theories of risk, Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 83-115
Friday 5th June
Why four types of players? And how they fare in a massively multiplayer game of life
Susanne Lohmann, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the Jacob Marschak
Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los
Angeles
Ever since 2012 every Spring Quarter 150 UCLA students participate in a fully online course titled
“Diversity, Disagreement, and Democracy.” Over the course of 10 weeks they simulate a massively
multiplayer game of life. Under conditions of identity protection, but not anonymity, students
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encounter one another over and over again as they play several dozen mini-games of cooperation,
competition, coordination, and collaboration. Students accumulate game points based on their
own decisions, the decisions made by other students, and luck. They write weekly reports relating
the game play data to social-scientific findings in evolutionary psychology, social psychology,
cultural theory, game theory, behavioural economics, political behaviour, public choice, and
computational social science. Students’ final grades depend on their cumulative gaming points and
their weekly reports.
In the social science laboratory, each mini game is executed anonymously and in isolation. By
way of contrast, in this online course the mini games are embedded in a larger game of life and
played under conditions of non-anonymity. It is only in the latter setting that four player types
emerge. The game of life simulation, by harbouring a diversity of games generating a complex
range of incentive and selection effects, enables the coexistence of four types, corresponding to
the four types identified by Mary Douglas (fatalist, individualist, egalitarian, and hierarchical).
Why four? There are four kinds of collective action: cooperation, competition, coordination,
and collaboration. Each player type is likely to do well in certain kinds of games and poorly in
other kinds of games. In a given kind of game, the bright side of one type offsets the dark side of
another type so that the various types, by virtue of their coexistence, save one another from ruin.
The four types earn roughly the same number of cumulative game points—after all, if one or the
other player type earned systematically fewer game points in the simulation setting, this would
suggest that the corresponding real-world type would have suffered a survival disadvantage in the
ancestral environment and hence died out.
Cultural orientations and coupled human and natural systems: the role of CT in shaping
signals within coupled systems
Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, Professor, Political Science and Associate Director, Centre for Applied Social
Research, University of Oklahoma
Carol Silva, Associate Professor of Political Science; Director, Centre for Risk and Crisis Management,
University of Oklahoma
and Joseph Ripberger, Deputy Director for Research, Centre for Risk and Crisis Management, University of
Oklahoma; Research Scientist, Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS)
In the current geologic era, dubbed the “anthropocene” by some scientists, the effects of human
actions on the ecosystem are evident and feedback effects, transmitted by signals of varying
amplitudes, on human systems. Our interest is in how cultural orientations influence the manner
in which natural feedback signals (e.g., changes in the patterns of precipitation and temperature)
are processed within social systems. This paper describes data from a new socio-ecological
observatory designed to facilitate sustainable, cross-disciplinary, and structured coupled human
and natural systems (CHANS) research. Using household-level data collected using a panel survey
from an address-based sample of households in Oklahoma, USA, we analyse the patterns of signal
receipt (perceptions of changes in weather patterns) and behavioural response to actual changes
in weather patterns. We examine the manner in which cultural orientations can dampen, or amplify,
the recognition of and response to such signals. The implications of CT orientations for CHANS
models, and for the resilience of communities faced by changing climate, are discussed.
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