Legal Commentary

The Culture Cognition Project--the people who showed that perception of purportedly neutral video is tinged by socio-political-cultural factors, experience, and ideology--are back with a new study showing how those same socio-political factors affect perceptions of whether speech is protected. (H/T: Dave Hoffman, one of the co-authors on the paper, along with Dan Kahan, Donal Braman, Danieli Evans, and Chris Rachlinski).

In the study, subjects were shown one of two videos of a protest outside a building and asked whether that protest violates a law prohibiting interfering with, obstructing, intimidating, or threatening anyone trying to enter, exit, or remain on a premises. The videos were evidence in a lawsuit against police officers who had halted the protest because it violated that law. The videos were identical except one was made to be a military recruiting office and the protesters were objecting to policies on gays in the military while the other was a reproductive health facility and the protesters were objecting to abortions performed there.

Using the same dimensions measuring worldview--Hierarchy/Egalitarian and Individualism/Communitarianism--the study found that viewers found the speech protected or not depending on how the protesters' speech aligned with the viewer's cultural values. From David's post:

In summary, motivated cognition not only polarized individuals of diverse cultural outlooks but also generated contradictions in what subjects of a shared orientation reported seeing. Relatively hierarchical and communitarian subjects rejected the proposition, credited by relatively egalitarian and individualistic ones, that demonstrators were blocking access to a facility represented to be an abortion clinic; yet when hierarchical communitarians understood the demonstrators to be objecting to the exclusion of openly gay and lesbian citizens from the military, they agreed the protestors were blocking access to the same building?a claim that egalitarian individualists now overwhelmingly dismissed. Subjects subscribing to a hierarchical individualistic outlook as well as those adhering to an egalitarian communitarian one exhibited similar shifts in perception.

Interesting stuff. It is empirical evidence of the "free speech for me and not for thee" approach. But it is seemingly backed by a showing that this conclusions is based on good-faith perception, that what one believes politically affects what one sees, where those political ideas are in play. I will have more thoughts once I read the whole paper.