Cultural worldviews on an aerospace standards committee: A preliminary analysis

Abstract

Technical committees for industry consensus standards involve multiple stakeholders. These stakeholders are experts who assess and perceive benefits and risks differently due to differences in their experiences, training, and cultural worldviews. Decision-making on technical committees is premised on information sharing and communications between these experts. We seek to understand how these worldviews drive decision-making criteria. Specifically, we aim to test the hypothesis that technical experts' worldviews are diagnostic of their technical preferences. In this paper, we surveyed members of the National Aerospace Standards Committee (NASC). We report preliminary results in our efforts to develop a survey that can reliably measure their cultural worldviews. Our approach was inspired by measures used by Kahan's cultural cognition paradigm, a method of categorizing individuals' worldviews and associated risk perceptions on a combination of Douglas's cultural theory of risk, and Slovic's Psychometric Paradigm. Preliminary results indicate support for the existence of different worldviews on the NASC.