I’ll See It When I Believe It: Motivated Numeracy in Perceptions of Climate Change Risk

Nurse, Matthew S.; Grant, Will J.

doi:10.1080/17524032.2019.1618364

Cited by 55 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…In other words, the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans tended to disagree most strongly in their evaluations of the validity of the test. A similar pattern has been observed in studies that use the same general design structure, but that used indicators of cognitive sophistication other than CRT performance, such as political knowledge (Kuru et al, 2017;Taber et al, 2009;Taber & Lodge, 2006) or numeracy (Kahan, Peters, et al, 2017;Nurse & Grant, 2019); in studies that used measures of political attitudes in lieu of political identity per se (Kuru et al, 2017;Taber et al, 2009;Taber & Lodge, 2006); as well as across several different political issues and outcome variables therein.…”

Section: Cognitive Sophistication and Politically Motivated Reasoningsupporting

confidence: 65%

“…Our results imply that existing key evidence for the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning is not particularly diagnostic. Specifically, our argument and results suggest that previous empirical studies supporting the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning (Kahan, 2013;Kahan, Peters, et al, 2017;Kuru et al, 2017;Nurse & Grant, 2019;Sumner et al, 2018;Taber et al, 2009;Taber & Lodge, 2006) likely do not demonstrate that cognitive sophistication magnifies a direct effect of political group motivation on reasoning (Causal Path #1, Figure 1); but, rather, that it magnifies a direct effect of specific prior beliefs (Causal Path #2). It is thus difficult to evaluate the extent to which the results therein offer support for the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning-because, as we have discussed at length, Causal Path #2 provides only ambiguous evidence of politically motivated reasoning per se (we refer to section 1.2 in the introduction for the full discussion).…”

Section: Implications For Theory and Existing Evidencecontrasting

confidence: 49%

“…The results of numerous recent studies are offered as evidence that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning (Kahan, 2013;Kahan, Peters, et al, 2017;Kuru et al, 2017;Nurse & Grant, 2019;Sumner et al, 2018;Taber et al, 2009;Taber & Lodge, 2006). In one study (Kahan, 2013), for example, U.S. partisans were asked to evaluate the validity of the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), a behavioral measure of the propensity and ability to think analytically (Frederick, 2005;Pennycook et al, 2016).…”

Section: Cognitive Sophistication and Politically Motivated Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rethinking the link between cognitive sophistication and politically motivated reasoning

Tappin¹,

Pennycook²,

Rand³

2018

Preprint

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Partisan disagreement is a salient feature of contemporary American politics. A surprising but robust aspect of this disagreement is that it is often the greatest among individuals who are the most cognitively sophisticated. A popular hypothesis for this phenomenon is that cognitive sophistication magnifies “politically motivated reasoning”—reasoning driven by the motivation to reach conclusions congenial to one’s political group identity. However, in the designs of studies supporting this hypothesis, the effect of political group identity is typically conflated with the effect of specific prior beliefs about the issue under study; and reasoning can be affected by such beliefs in the absence of any political group motivation. The diagnosticity of existing evidence is thus ambiguous. To shed new light on this issue, we conducted three experiments in which we statistically controlled for people’s specific prior beliefs—isolating the direct effect of political group identity—when estimating the association between their cognitive sophistication, political group identity, and reasoning in the paradigmatic design used in the literature. Despite observing a robust direct effect of political group identity (per se) on reasoning, we found no evidence that cognitive sophistication magnifies this effect. In contrast, we found fairly consistent evidence that cognitive sophistication magnifies a direct effect of specific prior beliefs on reasoning. We conclude that there is currently a lack of compelling empirical evidence that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning as commonly understood.

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Section: Cognitive Sophistication and Politically Motivated Reasoningsupporting

confidence: 65%

Section: Implications For Theory and Existing Evidencecontrasting

confidence: 49%

Section: Cognitive Sophistication and Politically Motivated Reasoningmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Rethinking the link between cognitive sophistication and politically motivated reasoning

Tappin¹,

Pennycook²,

Rand³

2018

Preprint

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show abstract

“…Most tests of this hypothesis have used a particular type of study design, in which subjects are asked to interpret and evaluate new information provided by the experimenter (Kahan, 2013;Kahan, Peters, et al, 2017;Kuru et al, 2017;Lind et al, 2018;Nurse & Grant, 2019;Sumner et al, 2018;Taber et al, 2009;Taber & Lodge, 2006). A key feature of this design is that the new information is manipulated to either favor or impugn subjects' political identities or general worldview, but is otherwise held the same across treatment groups.…”

Section: Cognitive Sophistication Magnifies Politically Biased Procesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating

2020

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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.

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“…Second, past research on motivated system 2 reasoning has relied upon correlating individual differences in cognitive sophistication (e.g. cognitive reflection, numeracy, education) with the extent of partisan differences on politicized issues 9,11,36 . Although it is generally thought that people scoring higher on cognitive sophistication scales are better at deliberation than people scoring lower on these scales, they also tend to differ in many other aspects.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning about climate change

Bagó¹,

Rand

Pennycook³

2020

Preprint

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Why is disbelief in anthropogenic climate change widespread despite broad scientific consensus to the contrary? A widely-held explanation involves politically motivated (“system 2”) reasoning: Rather than helping uncover truth, people use their reasoning abilities to protect their partisan identities and reject beliefs that threaten those identities. Despite the popularity of this account, the evidence supporting it (i) does not account for the fact that partisanship is confounded with prior factual beliefs, and (ii) is entirely correlational with respect to the effect of reasoning. Here, we address these shortcomings by (i) measuring prior factual beliefs and (ii) experimentally manipulating participants’ extent of reasoning using cognitive load and time pressure while they evaluate arguments for or against anthropogenic global warming. The results challenge the politically motivated system 2 reasoning account: Rather than exacerbating the impact of partisanship per se, engaging in more reasoning led people to have greater coherence between judgments and their prior factual beliefs about climate change - a process that can be consistent with rational (unbiased) Bayesian reasoning. Thus, we challenge the dominant cognitive account of climate disbelief, and suggest that interventions aimed at providing accurate information about climate change may be effective in the long run.

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I’ll See It When I Believe It: Motivated Numeracy in Perceptions of Climate Change Risk

Cited by 55 publications

References 40 publications

Rethinking the link between cognitive sophistication and politically motivated reasoning

Rethinking the link between cognitive sophistication and politically motivated reasoning

Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating

Reasoning about climate change

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