Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math
Farewell, Enlightenment: New research suggests that people even solve math problems differently if their political ideology is at stake.
—By Chris Mooney | Wed Sep. 4, 2013
Everybody knows that our political views can sometimes get in the way of thinking clearly. But perhaps we don't realize how bad the problem actually is. According to a new psychology paper, our political passions can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills. More specifically, the study finds that people who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.
The study, by Yale law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, has an ingenious design. At the outset, 1,111 study participants were asked about their political views and also asked a series of questions designed to gauge their "numeracy," that is, their mathematical reasoning ability. Participants were then asked to solve a fairly difficult problem that involved interpreting the results of a (fake) scientific study. But here was the trick: While the fake study data that they were supposed to assess remained the same, sometimes the study was described as measuring the effectiveness of a "new cream for treating skin rashes." But in other cases, the study was described as involving the effectiveness of "a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public."
The result? Survey respondents performed wildly differently on what was in essence the same basic problem, simply depending upon whether they had been told that it involved guns or whether they had been told that it involved a new skin cream. What's more, it turns out that highly numerate liberals and conservatives were even more—not less—susceptible to letting politics skew their reasoning than were those with less mathematical ability.
But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves—to fully grasp the Enlightenment-destroying nature of these results, we first need to explore the tricky problem that the study presented in a little bit more detail.
Problem on skin cream at link: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/new-study-politics-makes-you-innumerate
But now take the same basic study design and data, and simply label it differently. Rather than reading about a skin cream study, half of Kahan's research subjects were asked to determine the effectiveness of laws "banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public." Accordingly, these respondents were presented not with data about rashes and whether they got better or worse, but rather with data about cities that had or hadn't passed concealed carry bans, and whether crime in these cities had or had not decreased.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/new-study-politics-makes-you-innumerate
(I'm just posting the article, not commenting on DU discussions!)
= new reply since forum marked as read
