Groups as Epistemic Communities: Social Forces and Affect as Antecedents to Knowledge

Individuals desire a coherent worldview that both maintains personal affective states and contains functional knowledge enabling the completion of quotidian tasks. To create such a worldview, individuals seek information from both large-scale and local reference groups. Thus, group membership serves an important epistemic function. In this article, the core properties of social knowledge formation are conceptualized as the "epistemic calculus" of groups. Perceptions of low salience risks, such as global warming, are used to illustrate the social dimension of epistemic standards.