“We observed this kind of strange thing about these people who are high in science curiosity,” he says. Dan Kahan The more scientifically curious people are, the more they are immune to the power of partisan thinkingīecause he was curious, Kahan also included some of the politically charged questions that tend to polarize even the smartest of partisans in the faux marketing survey. So yes, there are “scientifically curious” conservative Republicans out there. And highly science-curious people are about evenly distributed across demographic groups and political leanings. They find that “science curiosity” is a trait that follows a bell curve in the population. Namely, scores predicted how long participants would spend watching a short science documentary - which they could turn off at any time - and how interesting they found the content.) (The researchers were confident the tool actually measures science curiosity because individuals’ scores on it nicely correlated with science-seeking behavior. The survey gave the option of choosing from a few articles to read, and the researchers noted which subjects people went for. His curiosity measure was clandestinely inserted into what looked like a marketing survey (so people weren’t aware they were taking a science curiosity test), and sent out to thousands of people.Īlong with asking questions about interests like “how often you read science books,” it included a behavioral measure of interest in science. The existing tools to gauge scientific interest were lacking. At first, they were developing a tool to measure an individual’s levels of science curiosity (for a separate project on how to make more engaging science documentaries). In his latest work, recently published in Advances in Political Psychology, Kahan and his collaborators - including researchers from the Annenberg Public Policy Center - weren’t setting out to cure partisan bias, at least not initially. And the smarter we are, the more we put our brain power to use for that end. Put another way: We have a lot of pressure to live up to our groups’ expectations. Why? “People are using their reason to be socially competent actors,” Kahan says. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.” “Partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. “Partisans with weak math skills were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology,” Ezra Klein explained in a profile of Kahan’s work. Kahan will then run another version of the same study, but instead of evaluating a drug trial, participants will be given figures about the effectiveness of gun control measures. In these conditions, people who are better at math tend to get the answer right more often than people who are bad at math. The participants will have to do some arithmetic to find out if the drug worked. For instance, they’ll be told there was a recent drug trial, and they’ll be given the numbers of people who were cured and not cured in both the treatment and placebo conditions. They’ll give participants a math problem to solve. Kahan and his collaborators’ experiments on politically motivated reasoning usually go like this. There’s an antidote to politically motivated reasoning, it turns out. That’s why his latest research finding “is totally unexpected,” he says. The motivation to conform is stronger than the motivation to be right. The phenomenon is called “politically motivated reasoning,” and it finds people use their minds to protect the groups to which they belong from grappling with uncomfortable truths. His findings are a blow to the great underlying assumption of democracy: that an informed public is the key for a government that works. It’s this: While we would like to believe we can persuade people on the other side of a political debate with evidence, his studies show the other side is likely to become even more deeply entrenched in its view in the face of more information. Dan Kahan is a professor of law and psychology at Yale whose research over the years has taught us something critically important about political debate today.
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