Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating

Abstract

A surprising finding from U.S. opinion surveys is that political disagreements tend to be greatest among the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans. Recent experiments suggest a hypothesis that could explain this pattern: cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing of new information. However, the designs of these experiments tend to contain several limitations that complicate their support for this hypothesis. In particular, they tend to (i) focus on people's worldviews and political identities, at the expense of their other, more specific prior beliefs, (ii) lack direct comparison with a politically unbiased benchmark, and (iii) focus on people's judgments of new information, rather than on their posterior beliefs following exposure to the information. We report two studies designed to address these limitations. In our design, U.S. subjects received noisy but informative signals about the truth or falsity of partisan political questions, and we measured their prior and posterior beliefs, and cognitive sophistication, operationalized as analytic thinking inferred via performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test. We compared subjects' posterior beliefs to an unbiased Bayesian benchmark. We found little evidence that analytic thinking magnified politically biased deviations from the benchmark. In contrast, we found consistent evidence that greater analytic thinking was associated with posterior beliefs closer to the benchmark. Together, these results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing. We discuss differences between our design and prior work that can inform future tests of this hypothesis.

The role of motivated science reception and numeracy in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…examining the role of numeracy), our data show that the ability to understand and reason with numbers is associated with decreased bias. Thus, our results are in line with previous studies suggesting that numeracy can lead to better decisions even in the context of highly politicized issues ( Connor et al, 2020 ; Lind et al, 2018 ; Tappin et al, 2020a )—and contradict those studies which have found increased motivated reasoning among highly numerate people ( Drummond and Fischhoff, 2017 ; Kahan et al, 2012 , 2017a , 2017b ; Nurse and Grant, 2020 ). This study revealed two more interesting findings concerning numeracy.…”

“…This finding, which may seem counterintuitive at first, is explained by the idea that highly numerate people can use their skills to rationalize their interpretations of existing evidence so that they align with their attitudes. Note, however, that not all studies that investigated motivated reasoning in the context of politically polarizing issues found such an effect ( Connor et al, 2020 ; Lind et al, 2018 ; Persson et al, 2021 ; Tappin et al, 2020a ). Thus, the relationship between numeracy and the degree of motivated reasoning may depend on various contextual factors.…”

Science beliefs, political ideology, and cognitive sophistication

“…What this indicates is that effects that appear to be due to motivated reasoning (e.g., the interaction between cognitive sophistication and ideology in the prediction of climate change beliefs) are not attributable to differences in reasoning per se, but rather to differences in motivations among high-and low-skill reasoners. The apparent association between polarization and cognitive sophistication when people are evaluating climate change arguments under standard instructions may simply be due to people who are higher in sophistication being more engaged with the task (i.e., more motivated), or perhaps having stronger prior beliefs (Bago et al, 2020;Tappin, Pennycook, & Rand, 2020;Tappin et al, 2021).…”

The cognitive science of fake news

“…But they found that higher CRT scores correlate with correctly rating fake news as less accurate and genuine news stories as more accurate, regardless of its fit with political leanings. In further work, the same group of researchers provide evidence that higher CRT scores are associated with updating of beliefs about factual political statements closer to Bayesian norms (Tappin et al, 2020a). The focus on belief updating is an important innovation because a shortcoming of other study designs is that they do not disentangle political identities from pre-treatment information exposure and issue-specific prior beliefs (Tappin et al, 2020b) A potential worry for this rival to Kahan's view can be motivated by other work by the very same group of researchers.…”