Politicized climate science: No evidence for science literacy driving motivated reasoning, or polarized belief-updating in a US national experiment

Abstract

A substantial literature demonstrates public polarization over climate change, particularly among the science literate. The dominant explanation for this phenomenon is that science literacy amplifies directional motivated reasoning, the tendency to interpret evidence such that it confirms desired conclusions. However, the evidence regarding this biasing account of science literacy is inconclusive. The present study tests the biasing account of science literacy in a national survey experiment among the U.S. population. Although results replicated the typical correlational pattern of political polarization as a function of science literacy, results delivered little support for the core causal claim of the biasing account—that science literacy drives motivated reasoning, and polarized belief-updating. First, results delivered little evidence that science literacy amplified motivated reasoning, despite strong motivated reasoning effects. And second, results delivered little evidence that science literacy amplified polarized belief-updating. That is, the science literate were polarized, but science literacy was not polarizing. These results help clarify the role of science literacy for public beliefs about contested science.

Contested science: Individuals with higher metacognitive insight into interpretation of evidence are less likely to polarize

“…Specifically, interventions targeted at increasing metacognitive accuracy (Elosúa et al, 2013;Zohar & Barzilai, 2013) may provide an effective means to mitigate societal polarization over science. This is encouraging since reducing political polarization is particularly relevant for domains where unified, collective action is required, such as for combating climate change (Brechin, 2016;Harris, 2007), but where prior research has repeatedly demonstrated that simply increasing the accuracy of object-level cognition, such as scientific literacy, or numeracy has limited success in reducing societal polarization, and may in fact even propel a societal divide (Kahan et al, 2012(Kahan et al, , 2017; but see Fischer, Huff & Said, 2021b).…”