I?ve long been interested in how the culture wars manifest in science and medicine. The term ?culture wars? has gone out of fashion, it seems, but now we tend to talk about the clash of values in psychological terms ? moral psychology, more precisely. Through the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the public has been introduced to the theory that moral reasoning is a product of the relative weight that individuals place on six foundations: harm, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and purity. Classically, liberals tend to put greatest emphasis on avoiding harm and ensuring fairness. Conservatives tend to value all six equally.

Now a close cousin of moral psychology ? cultural cognition, developed by the Yale law professor Dan M. Kahan ? is getting some long-deserved due in the public eye. A detailed profile of Kahan in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Paul Voosen, brings to life his efforts to expose the ?tribal biases that mediate our encounters with scientific knowledge.? The article focuses on Kahan?s analysis of climate change as the vehicle for exposing how very smart people find themselves in scientific conflict. Surely, ignorance of data is not the key issue here. Rather it is differences in, for example, how people judge risk, express their identities (individualistic versus communitarian), engage in motivated reasoning. In short: worldview trumps fact. The upshot? Left and right are equally vulnerable.

Clearly, this limits-of-data dynamic manifests in many other debates within science and technology policy and practice. These include controversies surrounding vaccines, nuclear power, gun control, electronic cigarettes, genetically modified food, organ markets ? and onward into the 21st century.