Motivated Numeracy and the Politics-ridden Brain

pretty apt. I'm not sure I've actually heard that one before, but but that certainly has a ring of truth to it. Really, you never heard that? I think I've heard that one. People roll that out all the time when they're talking about you know, industry shills, paid spokespeople, pr types. Um. Yeah, yeah. So. Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California in the nineteen thirties, and he claimed in a campaign retrospective that he used to tell his rally audience is this and it's a

great line. There's plenty of truth to it. Right. Yeah. By the way, for anyone who's not familiar up to in Sinclair lived through nine sixty eight, and he was the author of The Jungle and perhaps more known to some of our listeners for his story Oil, which was loosely adapted into the two thousand seventh film There Will Be Blood. Always going to be remembered for a movie first. But did he also write Boogie Nights the original version? Maybe so, John, maybe so? But but no, not just

an author but also a politician. Yeah, so he was used to talking about issues of public policy. I mean, he was a politically concerned writer. I think a lot of times people put him in categories like like with Charles Dickens. You know, somebody who's known for writing fiction but also for exposing the plight of the politically disadvantaged.

And so, yeah, this quote comes up a lot, like if you're talking about a lawyer representing big tobacco back in the day, who would come on TV and say the science isn't settled yet, there's no proof cigarettes cause cancer, or maybe a col industry lobbyists, maybe literally the same exact person comes on TV a few decades later and says, don't listen to the climate alarmist, that they're scientists on

both sides. You know, climate change isn't settled yet. When you're hearing from people like this who are like paid to represent a particular point of view, you obviously don't have to be a super skeptic to realize you shouldn't just take their word for it. Um, But people who get paid to tell you that the grass is pink and the sky is green are going to keep saying that. You know, you're not going to change their mind by offering them evidence or making good points or something, because

they're not here to figure out what's true. They're here to say their lines. Yeah, I'm I'm always reminded of the The Doctor character who would inevitably show up in the late night infomercials for various products. Um, you know, clearly they didn't just do a cold call and get get somebody in there to uh to to show for this product. Only Marw Burrow stimulates your cue zone when it comes to people like that. I guess this is

kind of a tangent. But when it when it comes to like people who shill for a particular you know, point of view, or or spokespeople for some kind of line on TV, I always kind of wonder, like, do they end up really truly believing the thing that they're paid to say, or is there some kind of cognitive dissonance in their brain. I don't know what it's like

to be in that mind. Yeah, that's a great question though, because I mean it's one thing for just like an individual to endorse a product, you know, yeah, like reading an ad or or even saying, hey, I tried out this product. It's really great. You guys should give it a try as well, which obviously we do on the show.

But but but when you get to that level where you have an expert, when you have say a medical doctor um, appearing on an infomercial or appearing even um, you know, in some sort of governmental body and saying, yes, I state my reputation on this, I state my professional um expertise, uh, put it on the line in support of this product or this industry and directly contradicting what appears to be the preponderance of the thence right, that that's what these industry shills come out to do, right,

they come out to tell you that the scientists are wrong. But anyway, given evidence that has emerged in recent years, I think maybe later on in this episode we should come back and try to do an updated version of this Upton Sinclair quote, because I think that the scope of this quote is actually too limited by just focusing

on the salary. So so we'll come back to this, But today we're gonna be talking about a form of motivated reasoning, a form of motivated reasoning called motivated numerous ee, and specifically how that relates to the idea of identity protective cognition. And this has come up on the show before. We talked about it in an episode a while back called Science Communication Breakdown. I think that was like a year and a half ago, or so, I believe so.

But it was based on when you had gone to the World Science Festival and seen a talk that included the work of the Yale psychologist Dan Kahan, who is he does a lot of really interesting research about biases and motivated reasoning and the ways in which our brains fail to be rational in one way, sometimes by being uh sort of subversively rational in another way. Yeah. Isn't it interesting how we sometimes uh as seem to outsmart

ourselves in these matters. Yeah. So I want to start by thinking about two different kinds of disagreements that come up when people talk about politics. There are obviously lots of different ways people can disagree about politics. Here here are two different kinds of currently politically relevant statements. One is somebody who says the government shouldn't have a right to tax my income. Right, you might talk to like

a libertarian who says that. And then here's a different politically relevant statement, human activity is the primary driver of global climate change. Now, people have political arguments over statements like both of these two all the time, but these are not at all the same kind of statement. One big difference is that the first statement is a statement about val I'll use like you can't do a bunch of empirical experiments to determine if it's correct or not

that the government should be allowed to tax people. That's just a question about what you believe should be the case. What about values and priorities, and about the priorities of the person making the statement, right, it's a it's a it's a commentary on how you think, or how one group thinks politics should work or how government should work. Rather, uh, and we shouldn't be confused by the idea of political science. Political science, though a serious field, is a different matter

compared to the natural sciences. Well, it's certainly true that with questions about like whether or not you should tax income, you can approach that question from the point of optimizing for certain goals, like if you specify a goal and you compare different methods of achieving that goal, then you can do that. But like, absent all of that kind of framework, that's just a statement about values. On the other hand, you've got the human activity is the primary

driver of global climate change change. That statement is not like that. There simply is a fact of the matter, either human activity is the primary cause of global climate change or it isn't. And you can do empirical experiments to test this hypothesis, and of course the answer is that, yes, we now know that it is the primary driver of global climate change with like a you know, ninety something percent certainty. It's we really really strongly know this. Now.

This is undoubtedly the scientific consensus. Even though this question is politically controversial, it's not scientifically controversial. And if you doubt this, you actually have the ability to go look up the evidence yourself. Especially that's one thing that the internet is great for. You can go read the most recent I p. C. C report. You can read the thousands of individual studies, you can look at the data and read the climate scientist's own words about how their

conclusions are drawn from the data of their experiments. And if you actually do that, I think any reasonable person should be able to conclude, of course, human activities the primary cause of climate change change. And yet that's not what happens, is it? Questions like this remain politically controversial, with people often judging the answer in a way that aligns with their political identity. Now, speaking of politics, I just want to throw in a quick fact Lloyd here

about this episode. We were recording this on election day. It will be published after election day. So yeah, so we don't know what the outcome is going to be. Yeah. So, so none of this, none of this is a commentary on things that have not yet occurred as of this recording. Yeah, And it's not really a commentary on politics per se. It's a commentary on psychology really that that is going to be at play and people of all political persuasions exactly.

So I think we should turn to look at the big paper that we're going to be focusing on in this episode. The the lead author was was Dan Kahan, but the other authors include Ellen Peters, Rika Cantrell Dawson,

and Paul Slovak. And it's called Motivated Numerousy and Enlightened Self Government, published in Behavioral Public Policy, I think first published in Revised in and they start off by observing the same kind of thing we've just been talking about that Obviously, there are questions where people can argue about their political values, but the politics is also full of these arguments about purely empirical questions, many of which are

no longer in fact empirically controversial, like is climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions? The answer is yes, but this is still politically controversial. Other questions like this that they give a big list of them. One would be like could we improve public safety by storing nuclear waste deep underground? And that one is a yes as well. I believe that's one that was brought up in the Penal World Science Festival that Kahan spoke on, and that

was one that actually I seem to be more divisive. Um, they kind of pulled the audience there at the World Science Festival, so you know, for the most part of very informed and curious bunch, but even they were not as well informed, uh on this issue as they were on some of these other issues we're talking about here. Yeah, Now, not all of these questions are going to be as

settled with as much confidence as other ones are. So like, we have a very high confidence now that greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change, but there could be other questions that are in theory empirical, even if we don't have a scientific consensus yet. I honestly don't know where this this next question falls in, whether it's more settled or less settled. But other questions would include things like, uh, do gun control measures reduce violent crime or increase it? Uh?

Does public spending in the aftermath of an economic recession increase the length of the recession or shorten it? And so with some of these questions, we don't always yet know the correct answer, but they are at least empirical. You can do tests, and you can gather data, and you can find with some degree of confidence that there is a correct answer. It's not just going to be an endless contest of values. Yes, it's in the domain

of science, and science can have at it. One of the interesting things about a lot of these questions is that they, for some reason almost always seem to concern questions or perceptions of risk. I guess maybe that's just what politics is about. Yeah, I think there is a lot of risk analysis in politics. I mean, obviously there's there's there's always a certain amount of fear mongering as well, Like how do you how do you capitalize on the

sort of risks that that voters are considering? How do you potentially stir up the flames or or or or tap them down a bit depending on what kind of a reaction you're looking for. Well, I guess you could look at many major policy decisions as um as conflicts between perceptions of different kinds of risks, right, Like, so somebody will say, well, there's a certain amount of risk we're running by not doing anything about global climate change.

Here the things that could result, and somebody else's yes, But if we do something about it, we risk I don't know, we risk not making enough money or something or or perrap perhap halps, it's yeah, we risk hurting ourselves in the short term or a lot of a lot of times, the short term risk versus long term risk,

immediate risk versus more you know, elusive risks, Yeah. Now, obviously, when you look at these questions that have been pretty convincingly answered with empirical evidence, and yet intense disagreement persists in politics, this obviously isn't helpful. Like there's enough under dispute over what values should drive public policy that it really doesn't help to add to that that, like unnecessary dead end disputes about underlying empirical facts when the science

or the facts are actually pretty clear. So the question is why how come you can have a question where the evidence is very clear, such as the cause of climate change being related to the burning of fossil fuels, but the public not being in general agreement about it. And this this paper looks at two major competing hypotheses to explain this, like why people don't accept the facts

when the facts are pretty clear. And the first one is the hypothesis they call the science comprehension thesis or the SCT, and basically it goes like this, the public in general has a pretty weak understanding of science. We are likely to misunderstand what scientists are telling us. If you put a scientific paper in front of us, we're probably not gonna understand it. Thus, we're likely to be misled by people who are trying to deceive us to

their own advantage. And I think unfortunately, or well, I don't want to pre empt what we get to in

a bit, but I guess we could say unfortunately. This hypothesis is pretty common among skeptics and science enthusiasts and even scientists themselves, and I feel myself very drawn to it because if you accept that the problem is, um, we're just not scientifically literate enough to understand what's being talked about, in a way, this is actually kind of hopeful, especially if you're an educator or a science communicator, because the problem is simply a lack of knowledge. There's just

a deficit that can be made up. And so if you just you know, community, you give people better scientific education, better communication of the scientific reality. Under this hypothesis, if you just teach people better scientific literacy skills, they will finally see the light and come around and accept the empirically verifiable facts. Yeah, there's hoping this because you can you can teach people about science. You can you can

teach people more about logical thinking as well. Um And though of course I think that's clearly part of scientific literacy as well. But but I can't help but think back to, for instance, Carl Sagan's discussion of on the Bologna Detection Kit, like, the problem is people don't have the kit online, right, or they don't have all the tools and the kit for instance, just to just to blow through these really quickly. He goes into far more detail in the demon Haunted world. But the nine tools

are and again abbreviated Number one. Whenever possible, there must be independent confirmation of the facts. Facts and quotations uh Number two. Encourage a substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view. Number Number three. Arguments from authority carry little weight. Authorities have made mistakes in the past, they will do so again in the future. In science, there are no authorities. At most there are experts.

Number four. Spin more than one hypothesis. Number five. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours. Hard Number six quantify If whatever it is you're explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you'll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. This is why numbers are often useful in science exactly. Number seven. If there's a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work, including the premise, not just

most of them. Number eight Acam's razer. This is basically, when you have um two hypotheses that explain data equally well, you choose the simpler of the two. Right, So like a dream or a hallucination is probably a better explanation for your alien abduction experience than aliens coming here exactly. And then finally, the knife tool in a Bolognay detection kit always ask whether the hypothesis can be at least in principle falsified. Propositions that are untestable or unfalsifiable are

not worth much. That's a really good kit. And I think Carl Sagan, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I do think he he seems to operate from that kind of hopeful scientific comprehension thesis point of view. At least as best I can tell, it seems like he thinks, you know, the problem with the lack of scientific skepticism among the people is just that they need access to better tools like this, and if we can communicate those tools to them, they can bring

them online. And then they'll be more protected against the titular Bolognay, yeah, I think so. Now back to this paper, the authors write that on this hypothesis, on the science comprehension thesis, the lack of comprehension skill causes people to over rely on what's calling what's known as system one thinking when judging empirical scientific questions like perceptions of risk.

Now we should mention a little bit about the difference between these concepts of system one thinking and system to thinking. This is big in the works of people like Daniel Kanaman who have written about behavioral economics and the psychology of bias and stuff that's right. It was key to his two thousand and eleven book Thinking Fast and Slow. Um, And we've talked about system one thinking system to thinking on the show before I Think, I think so. Yeah.

The basic explanation here, system one thinking is all about fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, and unconscious thinking. This is the theory. This is ruled by heuristics, you know, shortcut ways of thinking. When you when you look at two piles of things and want to know how many, you know which pile has more things in it. If you just judge by I don't know your eyeball. It that system one system to thinking would be what maybe you count the things in the pile? Right?

It is slow, effortful, infrequent, logical calculating, and conscious. This reminds me a lot of the two fear networks that were recently discussed in the show Yeah and the Slayer episode Yeah. System two is all about avoiding the tiger haunted thickets. Well, if you rely on system one, then you're more of a tiger racer, a tiger boxer, or

just I guess, just a straight up tiger denier. And you know, both of those systems are necessary actually because we don't always have time to do deliberate, slow logical calculating conscious thought a lot. You know, if we did that about every decision we made, we couldn't live. That would be no way to survive. You have to be fast and reactive and unconscious about all kinds of things.

And so the question is how do you choose which types of decisions and scenarios to apply these two different thinking schema to on the science comprehension thesis, I think the idea is that people are relying on system one thinking to answer empirical questions about science that are politically relevant, whereas they should be using their system to thinking to get through the get through the fast reactive, stereotypic kind

of thing ing and come to the correct answer. Fun fact, we used to be owned by a company that called itself System one UH, named after this this mode of thinking. But that's not the only hypothesis on offer. That's the science comprehension thesis. The other hypothesis, the rival hypothesis, is what if the problem with controversies over empirical questions is not that they're caused by a deficit of knowledge or

cognitive skill UH. And this other idea the authors called the identity protective cognition thesis or the i C t They write, quote, whereas s CT attributes conflicts over decision relevant science two deficits in science comprehension, I SET sees the public's otherwise intact capacity to comprehend decision relevant science

as disabled by cultural and political conflict. In other words, it's not that people can't understand the science, it's that they could understand the issue if they were not politically charged urged. And it is specifically the political charging of the issue that makes it impossible for them to understand what they otherwise might be able to. All right, so I have to try and put this into tiger terms. Okay, So it's like having the capabilities to avoid tiger kill zones,

but refusing to do so for political reasons. Right, Yes, all your friends around you maybe are saying like, oh no, that the people who say that the tigers hang out in the jungle are dumb. They are the bad people, real people, really, the good people all know that there are no tigers in the jungle, that the tigers are somewhere else. I do admit I love it anytime we can put things in terms of big cat attacks. That

always just seems to really help explain the topic. You should know, I'm picturing not a real tiger, but Tony the tiger. Yeah, Tony the tiger mauling and killing people a right. Okay, So here's the question. If this hypothesis is correct, why would it be the case that political charging of issues would make us enable to use our normal reasoning faculties. Well, first of all, I mean think

about the Upton's and Claire quote. It's difficult to make a person understand something when their salary depends on it. Here we're not talking about a salary, but about something else of immense psychic and material value, and that is your membership, status and standing within a social group that is in part defined by its commitment to certain moral and political values. Well, I think that's very much like salary. I mean, salary is money, money is life, money is happiness.

I mean we say it's not, but it is. Uh, and then uh and then but but it is the thing that allows us to eat and live and be in most circumstances, certainly in the world that we've we've we've made and remade for ourselves and likewise, in a more primal sense, belonging to a group, being part of a group, that is, that is survival for for the Homo sapiens. Yes, that is how we have historically and

prehistorically managed to live. It's psychically necessary to us. It's necessary for us to have good mental and in fact, I think in some ways good physical health, to be a member in good standing of a social group and a social network. But if you want to go into our you know, our our evolutionary history, it is literally materially necessary to be accepted as a member of the

end group. If you're driven out of your hunter gatherer tribe that things are not looking good for you, you're just waiting to fall into a tiger thicket at that point, right. And so, if all your friends and allies believe one way about any politically charged issue, climate change or gun control or whatever, and you put yourself at huge personal risk by advocating a position that that group disagrees with, you could be alienated from your social group. You could

lose connections that you depend on for mental health and survival. Thus, you could definitely see identity protective cognition as a kind of mental immune system. It protects the brain from beliefs that could potentially cause you immense harm if you were to express them. The brain detects a belief or an idea that is a threat to your social identity, and it puts up a wall against that belief and doesn't let it in because it could hurt you. You know, And I think we can all relate to this on

one level or another. You know, how many times have any of us said, well, I refuse to believe that, or I find that hard to believe U. And of course there are a lot of examples that come up in which the issues relate more clearly to personal belief and and or just pure opinion and artistic value. For instance, of a movie reviewer television reviewer tells me that an

upcoming Cohen Brothers movie isn't worth seeing. I generally find that hard to believe until I see it for myself, and say, in the case of Inside Lewyn Davis, I end up agreeing with what Inside Lewyn Davis. You know it was wonderfully made. Prepare to be ostracized, but you know it was wonderfully made. But it was just not my cup of tea. Oh I loved it. I love Oscar Isaac. It was Oh man, he's such a great singer to the music was wonderful. The music was was great.

It just did not It did not make me happy or make me sad in an interesting way. You know, I will, I will do my best not to fully alienate you and throw you out into the cold. So but that's one thing, right, Ultimately coming down to art in personal opinion. Uh, And and there are I think there are going to be certain areas where you are going to be so attached to certain artistic values that you're going to feel reluctant to state it because of

how it might affect your standing in a group. Oh yeah, so that's a different kind of variation. Like there are some unpopular aesthetic opinions that you're not really scared to voice because you could abandon them if you needed to. Maybe, but I really deeply held aesthetic preference that would be unpopular you maybe just don't even bring up. Yeah, Like I imagine a band abandoning suddenly abandoning your favorite rock band in high school. You know that sort of thing.

But but clearly, you know a lot of these other issues are all so are going to be different matters, say, matters of hearsay or something that's just not completely provable one way or another, uh, say, some bit of dirt on a political candidate that can need to be confirmed or denied. But then we have to come back to those empirical questions, the ones where science can and does weigh in on the matter. Yes, and fortunately, as the authors point out, not that many empirical questions are really

likely to trigger identity protective cognition. Only empirical questions that are unfortunate enough to get tagged as politically significant along partisan lines really acquired this taint. For example, you know, there's been a partisan divide over the HPV vaccine, probably because it has some kind of perceived relevance to sexual morality and young people. But there's no partisan divide on the use of antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, and most

questions are more like the antibiotics. There's just there's not a partisan divide about it. What you know, temperature, water boils or scientific questions. There's just not really a partisan divide. Dawn though, to come back to antibiotics, I see, I

see a dark future. I see there could be a time where if members of one major political party but not the other, happen to start talking about antibiotics, I think you could quite easily see partisan associations arise, and antibiotics could go from an issue that's non politicized where pretty much everybody agrees to an issue that suddenly is divided along partisan lines. Now that that seems sadly like the kind of thing we would do. But to come

back on the other side, Okay, wait a minute. Don't people also have an incentive to have correct beliefs obviously, right, I mean right, yeah, I mean we It definitely pays off to have a working, realistic model of how the world works that you live in. But it pays off in some ways that are much more personally immediately relevant than others. Uh, depending on the issue. Think about it.

In policy relevant empirical questions like the impact of carbon emissions or the act of gun control policies, the consequence of one individual person being wrong is vanishingly small. But for that one person, the consequence of being alienated from

their identity group is potentially massive. So on one decision, you potentially cast one vote out of millions for a poorly reasoned public policy, and on the other decision, you could alienate or weaken your most important friendships, your work relationships, and even your sense of self um and so the author's right quote persistent conflict over risks and other policy relevant facts reflects a tragedy of the science communications commons,

a misalignment between the individual interests that culturally diverse citizens have informing beliefs that connect them to others who share their distinctive understanding of the best life, and the collective interests that members of all such groups share in the enactment of public policies that enable them to pursue their ends free from threats to their health and prosperity. Okay, maybe we should take a quick break and when we come back we can take a look at how we

can compare these two hypotheses. Alright, we're back, So, yeah, we're gonna look at ways to compare these two hypotheses. Now, of course, in all of this, I can't help but think, well, why can't it be both? Why can't we can't we have like both of these uh, these uh, these reasons

in play? You mean that? So we've got the two hypotheses, the science comprehension thesis, which says that people come to incorrect beliefs about scientifically are politically relevant empirical questions because they lack the scientific literacy skills to understand the issues. And then the other one says it's not that they lack the skills to understand the issues, it's that they are being selectively blinded from proper reasoning by identity protective

cognition that is socially conditioned. Right, the idea coming back to Segan's toolkit. It's like, do I not have the tools or is there just this like this, there is a social and psychological reason for not using the tools that I have. Well, I think technically you could have both in a way. So the question would be, um, can you show that these are are mutually exclusive, and

that would come through in the evidence. But you certainly could have a population that has fewer science comprehension skills than it could and so you could educate people in science better and we would have higher scientific comprehension skills. But also within that population, identity protective cognition could be highly salient. So that's a good question. But if you want to pit these two hypotheses against each other, you can create just create conditions where they're obviously going to

be antagonistic as far as the data is concerned. So here's one idea. If the science comprehension thesis is correct, right, the problem is a deficit and understanding science. People who are better at drawing correct conclusions from scientific data will be better at it, whether or not the data concerns

politically relevant issues. Right, So it should mean that if the s CT is correct, the science comprehension thesis, it should mean that if you have scientific understanding skills like numerous e, which is skill at using numbers and drawing conclusions from from quantitative data. If you have high NUMEROUSY you should be better at drawing the correct conclusions from data,

whether or not that data flatters your political perceptions. UM. On the other hand, if the identity protective cognition thesis is correct, people who are better at drawing correct conclusions from scientific data will see this skill significantly hampered by the introduction of a political identity threat. All right, so I have a feeling we're gonna we're gonna look at

some experiments. Yes, So the experiment is big sample of one thousand, one hundred and eleven demographically diverse and ideologically diverse US adults. Uh, and you sort them according to a couple of major factors. One is political ideology, so they're sort of on on a scale of how liberal or conservative they rate themselves. And then the next is

their numeracy skills, determined by a numeracy test. The author's right quote a well established and highly studied construct and NUMEROUSY encompasses not just mathematical ability, but also a disposition to engage quantitative information in a reflective and systematic way and to use it to support valid inferences. So it's not just being good at math, but it's being able to say, look at data in a study and figure

out what that data should tell you. So the authors came up with a couple of fictional experiments, and they took the results of these fictional experiments and asked the

participants to draw conclusions based on the results they showed them. Now, both the results of the fictional experiment and the topic of the experiment were manipulated to create different test conditions, so the same results were offered in the context of either being about quote the effectiveness of a new skin rash treatment or quote the effectiveness of a ban on carrying concealed weapons in public. One of those is going

to be more controversial than the other. Right, So what they're saying is they they expect that the skin rash treatment is not going to have any partisan significance unless I don't know, major Republicans or Democrats start talking about skin rashes a lot, but at this point it was not politically relevant. The other is, of course, being about guns, which is one of the most highly charged, politically charged

topics where people break down along partisan lines. Okay, so imagine you're one of the people who's a subject in this experiment, they will give you a table of results to look at, and it might say it's say it's you're in the skin rash condition. It might You'll have a table of four numbers, and the different numbers represent patients who did use a new skin cream and patients who did not use a new skin cream. And then the other axes of the table will be patients whose

rash got worse and patients whose rash got better. And then you need to determine, based on the numbers and the table, whether the skin cream is more helpful or more harmful, and then substitute in the exact same thing for instead of using patients using a skin cream, cities that did or did not ban carrying concealed handguns in public, and instead of the rash getting worse or the rash getting better, it's crime went down or crime went up.

So the authors had three hypotheses three that they would test here. One is that they guessed subjects scoring high in numeracy would be more likely to get the right result in both skin treatment conditions. And this is pretty straightforward. Basically, they're saying people who have higher numeracy skills are more likely to use deliberate system to thinking to work out the covariance between the results and draw the correct conclusions. They're more likely to get the skin rash thing right.

Hypothesis too, is based on the science comprehension thesis, So if the science comprehension thesis is correct, they predict that subjects scoring higher in numeracy QUOTE would be more likely to construe the data correctly, not only when it was consistent with their ideological predispositions, but also when it was inconsistent with them, and thus they were likely to display

less ideological polarization than subjects lower in numeracy. In other words, on the science comprehension thesis, if you're better at understanding quantitative science, your interpretation of the results of the gun band thing should be less affected by political bias. And then, finally, they have a third hypothesis based on the identity protective

cognition thesis QUOTE. Ideological polarization in the gun band conditions should be most extreme among those highest in numerous E. Under this hypothesis, people high in NUMEROUSY are not immune from identity protective cognition and will, like everyone else, always seek ways to affirm their existing political beliefs, but using their NUMEROUSY skills, they can use system to thinking to draw correct but counterintuitive inferences from the data when it

flatters their beliefs, but detect that they should skip this and use quick heuristics to arrive at the wrong, wrong answer when that flatters their beliefs. So quote, if high numerous E subjects use their special cognitive advantage selectively only when doing so generates an ideologically congenial answer, but not otherwise, they will end up even more polarized than their low numerous EY counterparts. And so here we get to the results.

So first thing worth noting is that detecting covariance is difficult if you're not experienced in it. So across all test conditions, most people got the answers wrong. All test conditions combine, fifty nine percent of subjects supplied the incorrect answer. Uh. And this is probably because if you just look at the numbers and use a quick heuristic or system one thinking, you're likely to draw the opposite of the correct conclusion.

You'd actually have to do the math and compare some ratios to come up with the correct answer, but the results found hypothesis one, which was that if you're high and numerous E, you're you've got a better chance of getting the skin rash results correct. That was ordered by

the data. The better yard at numerocy, the more likely you are to draw correct inferences from politically neutral data, though most people were not very good at this um hypothesis to which would be consistent with the scientific comprehension thesis that people high in numeracy will show less polarization on the gun band condition, This was not supported by

the data. Conversely, hypothesis three was supported by the data, and and that one was that people with high NUMEROUSY skills will show even more ideologically polarized judgments about the results in the gun band condition. And so what the authors conclude is that high numerous E partisans use their skills selectively. When a laborious system to calculation will yield results that are flattering to your political point of view, you'll do it. But when it threatens your point of view,

you'll skip it. You'll skip system to reasoning and just draw incorrect heuristic conclusions. Uh. And so a few takeaways here. I think we should think about while we're discussing this one is that I should stress this study doesn't show that science education and science communication efforts are pointless or

bad or anything like that. Science comprehension skills, including numerous e are crucial for answering all kinds of questions accurately when a system one heuristic model would cause you to come to the wrong conclusion. So it's kind of the baseline, right, you've got to have scientific comprehension skills. But if these results are valid, what they do show is that science comprehension skills are not necessarily a protection against getting politically

charged science questions wrong. Because the brain uses its science comprehension skills selectively. It's more likely to bring out the big guns if they will help it protect its identity, and it's more likely to surrender to heuristic thinking if that's what protects your identity. Another way of putting it, political identity can make you selectively bad at math, even

if you're normally good at math. And so in this week, this is where we get into some of these theories where we see, say you know an individual um that that has a scientific background or PhD or what have you, uh that you see showing up on the side of say, climate change deniers, or or even something more ridiculous like a like a like a flat earth belief system. Yeah, I almost never see it with flat earth beliefs, but

you do see it with climate change most definitely. What you notice with climate changes that like, um, sometimes people come up with lists of scientists who don't agree with the consensus on climate change, and usually almost none of them work in fields relevant to climate change. Uh. You know, they're not like climate scientists. I'm not saying there are

no climate scientists that disagree, but they're almost none. They tend to be somebody like one example that often comes up and I honestly can't remember to what extent his disagreement is with it, but say, Freeman Dyson is an individual of note who has at least at times cast some doubt in the area, but is brilliant. Is Freeman Dice and Susan was He's not a climate scientist, right, It's it tends to be people commenting outside their area of expertise, and yet they still have the aura of

credibility because it's like, well, these are smart people, they're scientists, right. Uh, So you know, you'll see a list of scientists who don't accept the consensus on climate change, and they might be like petroleum engineers and stuff like that. You know, so it's like, not like petroleum engineers aren't smart. I mean, I'm sure all all these people are very smart people.

But it's just that having scientific comprehension skills does not protect you against arriving at malinformed, bad conclusions that support your identity. Now, of course, one of the tools and seconds toolkit I had to do with replication. Yes, uh so that's always a big question. And in fact I found one thing that I wanted to explore real quickly.

If you follow psychology research and you saw something about motivated numerousy failing replication in a recent study, I think that's probably a reference to a conference paper draft presented an seventeen that claimed, as part of its findings to

fail to replicate the motivated numeracy effect. And then Dan Kahan and Ellen Peters, two of the original authors of the first paper we were talking about, in response, defended their paper as best as I can tell, quite successfully by pointing out that the study that failed to replicate the motivated reasoning effect. Uh number one had a very small sample size and fifty five and was ideologically homogeneous.

It was basically liberal, and in a paper called rumors of the non replication of the motivated numeracy effect are greatly exaggerated, uh Kahan and Peters. They so they they argue against this supposed failed replication, and they also present the results of their own replication attempt with a with a sample size of fife, in which they did successfully replicate the findings of the original very closely. And so as far as I can tell, motivated numeracy through identity

through identity protective cognition and is still pretty solid. It looks solid to me. And also, as far as I can tell, that's not just me defending a cherished belief that's important to my identity through motivated judgment, because in fact, I find I strongly dislike the idea of identity protective cognition.

I think I would much rather live in the world of so many of our anthropogenic climate change accepting peers, and where you know, it's the world where if you could just educate people enough with better science literacy skills, these dead end public disputes over pretty solid empirical science

could be resolved. What mean you could essentially win an argument over these issues by presenting facts, presenting data, And that's how a lot of these you know, like science people want it to be like that, right, sciencey people want to say, well I can, I'll just bring more evidence you. I'll show up with even more references next time, and that'll get them. But I'm afraid the evidence seems to be coming in that it doesn't necessarily work that way.

And maybe, and you know, we shouldn't be all or nothing in the way we talked about things. Different different types of appeals will work with different people, but on average, that does not appear to be how people work. All right, Well, on that note, we're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're gonna expand on the the concept a little bit and talk about what can possibly be done and talk about Scott Steiner. Oh, yes, thank alright,

we're back. So, Joe, were you familiar with the Scott Steiner before I mentioned him to you? I was not tremendously familiar, But you sent me the best video I've seen all week. Yes, so this, uh, this was a video and this is readily available online because it it kind of went viral and became its own meme. But yeah, it's a video of professional wrestler Scott Steiner, a k a. Big Papa pump Um. Okay, yeah, well I think I knew him better by that name. Yeah that was Yeah,

that was a moniker he adopted at one point. Uh and it's This is a clip from a wrestling promotion that was known in TOO in two thousand eight is t n A. The promotion is now called Impact, and Miner launched into a backstage promo that, in typical pro wrestling fashion, is all shouty and laced in macho pravada, but in a twist, it's also full of math and statistics. So he makes the rigorous yes yes, and in this particular promo he makes the following claims, I'm just gonna

roll through these in a normal human voice. Okay. So he points out that normally a wrestler has a fifty chance of winning a match, all else being equal share Okay, yeah, but given his uh Big Papa pump superior genetics um, his opponent Samoa Joe only has a chance of winning. But it's a three way match as well, and it involves Kurt Angle so each participant here has a thirty three and a third percent chance of winning, but he but since Kurt Angle, according to to Steiner, knows that

he cannot win, he won't try. Uh So Steiner presses the following point quote, So, Samoa Joe, you take your thirty three and one third chance, it's minus my twenty percent chance, and you have an eight and one third chance of winning at Sacrifice, Sacrifice being the name of the pro wrestling event. But when you take my seventy five percent chance of winning, if we were to go one on one and then add sixty six and two thirds per cents, I got one and forty one and

two thirds chance of winning at Sacrifice. See Samoa Joe. The numbers don't lie, and they spelled disaster for you at Sacrifice. Did you watch Sacrifice? Were you there? I did not. I was not there. I did to watch some clips from it. Looks like it was, you know, pretty hard hitting match. Interestingly enough, um Samoa Joe. One oh Man. However, Kurt Angle was injured and had to be replaced by another wrestler, so one assumes that that

would have changed the equation somewhat. Despite having a negative forty one chance of winning one. So um, yeah, this, but as Steiner says, the numbers don't lie or do that? Is this admittedly ridiculous example. Is this is this Scott Steiner falling prey to a lack of understanding regarding numeracy or is it motivated numeracy? Is he just so highly motivated by his dislike of Samoa Joe and his belief in his own superior genetics that he just so uh

you know, readily mishandles them. Uh. That might be a better example of a mathematical incarnation of the Dunning Krueger effect. That's sure. But this is where you believe that you have more fluency in a particular area than you actually do. Yes, because the we we should, we should get into it at one time, the Dunning Kruger effect, because there's a I know, there is a more nuanced understanding of it than you usually see when it's deployed in the media

and stuff. But the basic idea is that with the Dunning Krueger effect, if you are not very good within a skill set or within a knowledge domain, you also lack the meta cognitive capacities to understand what would make somebody good at it. Thus you fail to grasp your own shortcomings. And thus people who are very low skilled or very low knowledge in a certain domain tend to vastly overestimate their skills or their knowledge because they can't

know they can't know what they don't know. All right, Well, I realized that this example was was maybe more entertaining than helpful. Still my only opportunity to really work Scott Steiner into an episode. Come on, we've been plowing through a psychology paper. We've gotta have a little wrestling to lighten the load. Alright, Well, well, now that we've lightened the load, let's let's come back to like the big remaining question you have? You have motivated numeracy? Uh is

the key thing that's happening here? If this is the the enemy, the threat, then how do we deal with it? Yeah? Like? What what can be done? And so? One thing I would take away from this research is that good science education and science communication are necessary, but not sufficient. Necessary but not sufficient to produce a correctly informed citizen. Read You can't have people making good judgments without understanding the facts.

But the better they understand the facts, the more they'll use their understanding to support their identity derived point of view. So Kahan and others proposed that the way to beat motivated reasoning is not necessarily to improve the reasoning, but to remove the motivation. To remove the motivation, I like that. That reminds me so much of Krishna's words to Arginna

in the Hindu epic the Baka bad Ghita. Uh yeah, yeah, if if if I may, I'd like to read, you know, because having come from the quoting Scott Steiner, I obviously want to move on to the other high literature. Yes, uh so this is these are the words of of Krishna, that man alone is wise, who keeps the mastery of himself. If one ponders on objects of the sense, there springs attraction. From attraction grows desire, Desire flames to fierce passion, passion

breeds recklessness. Then the memory all betrayed. Lets noble purpose go and say apps the mind. Until purpose, mind and man are all undone. But if one deals with objects of the sense, not loving and not hating, making them serve his free soul, which rests serenely Lord Low, such a man comes to tranquility, and out of that tranquility shall rise the end and healing of his earthly pains. Since the will governed sets the soul at peace. I'd say the will governed as much asier said than done,

isn't it. Oh yeah, I mean that's why we've clearly we're still struggling with it. And uh, you know, and I don't want to you know, obviously this is a this is the work of immense literary significance and in deep philosophy. But but yeah, this idea of of acting without passion seems to to line up reasonably well with this idea of tackling various um uh you know, innumerable

um problems without bringing in this political motivation. Yeah. Though, of course it seems very unfortunate that I think a lot of this motivation comes in unconsciously, right, because I mean, we we I guess we haven't really addressed this so far. But you have to assume that people are not generally and you probably know from your own experience at least if it's like mine, they're not generally thinking like, Okay, how should I trick myself right now to come to

the wrong conclusion because it would be socially acceptable. It doesn't feel like that to think about political issues that you know, are empirical issues that are politically relevant. Um, it just feels like, well, I'm just trying to figure out what's right, but obviously I must be doing this at least sometimes. Yeah, we're just kind of we're often just we're swimming through life. We're not necessarily thinking about

the individual strokes. You know, it all kind of comes together and we end up making these mistakes and cognition and to reemphasize what the authors of that original paper we're talking about, I mean, in a way, this is rational. It's rational in a perverse way. Not in a good way that ultimately creates the most benefit, but in a kind of short term perversity. It is rational. Like you will sometimes hear people talking about or lament in politics,

how others just won't do what's rational. But given a certain interpretation of rational self interest, this irrational relationship with empirical questions makes perfect sense. The author's right quote what any individual member of the public thinks about the reality of climate change, the hazards of nuclear waste disposal, the efficacy of gun control is too inconsequential to influence the risk that that person, or anyone he or she cares

about faces. Nevertheless, given what positions on these issues signify about a person's defining commitments, forming a belief at odds with the one that predominates on it within important affinity groups of which such a person as a member could expose him or her to an array of highly unpleasant consequences. Thus, like, we know that it's radically consequential, what in general public policy is about climate change or gun policy or something.

You know, these are hugely important questions, but the impact of one individual person his opinion feel small enough that you basically the consequences of that are almost irrelevant. It's like, what's really relevant is how is this affecting me in my day to day? And now it's primarily affecting you in your day to day? Is the social consequences of

the beliefs you express? But obviously that's not what we want, right, Like, we want everybody making rational decisions, having correct empirical information to reason from. Of course they're still gonna argue about political values, but at least having everybody except the same set of correct facts when correct facts are on the table, right, I mean, a lot of it comes kind of comes down to the fact that we are a short sighted species that can, you know, barely see beyond our own horizon.

But but we are attempting to see beyond that arizon. We are trying to to to maintain a world or create a world that can be sustained in some fashion. We you know that the the old addage, of course, is making thinking about your children and your grandchildren when when you're making decisions such as ease. But historically it's not the sort of thing that we're great at as a species. And yeah, and so it's clearly not enough just to tell people like, well, here's a problem with

how you're probably thinking. You're probably doing identity protective cognition, and you need to stop it. You know that that that's just obviously not going to work as just asking somebody to shut their mind their ears off, like like, oh, yeah, they're really going to listen to you now, buddy. Yeah, I mean, and they're they're probably not even doing it on purpose, right, I mean, you and I are doing

it sometimes, we're not doing it on purpose. The people who do this, they're not doing it out of a will to deceive themselves. Is just happening as part of what the brain does, even unconsciously. So the question is, could you do something external? Could you create a state of affairs that would change the incentive structure? Do what the author said and somehow change the motivation. If you can't change the reasoning and motivated reasoning, maybe you can

change the motivation and motivated reasoning. So here's one thing I'm thinking about. Most politically relevant. Numeracy is basically recreational, right, Like you need to get the numbers right when you're calculating your bank balance. But if you get the numbers wrong when you're talking about gun control or climate change, there's no immediately detectable consequence to you, as long as you get them wrong in the way that your social group approves of. And this is not true of every

person in every context. For example, why does scientists working within their own fields UH tend usually to get the numbers right? Of course, not always, but usually, like, regardless of whatever their political opinions are, if they're doing work within their field, they tend to get it right most of the time. Well, because they're gonna be other scientists that are going to be attempting to UH to perform the same experiment to see if they get the same results.

They're gonna be people reading it, and if they see the error, they are going to they are going to correct them on it. I mean, that's part of the process. Yeah, there's a strong incentive to get the numbers right. Failed numeracy in your own published research is potentially a major blow to your credibility, to your career, to your standing among your professional peers and stuff. So I wonder if it's possible to change the incentive structure for non scientists

to somehow be more like that. This might be just completely impossible fantasy, but is there a way you could make it so that getting the factually correct answer is incentivized in and in the social situations of lay people, and arriving at conclusions in agreement with your social group is not especially incentivized that maybe is that just a totally unrealistic hope. Can human nature change that much? And it does sound kind of daunting, like like what kind

of structure or system would enforce that? And then how does it know? How do you roll it out successfully? I'm some I'm sure some tech billionaire has some kind of nightmaresh idea for an app that would do that,

but in fact we just destroy everything. They're all sorts of sort of black mirror esque solutions that come to mind, but they all have like a black mirror s twist where you can see how it would screw things up, or where people would essentially rebel against it and say, like, you know what, I don't I don't really want Facebook or Twitter or what have you coming along and calling me on things that I've said that we're incorrect in the past. Maybe about just why my account instead suffering

that embarrassment. Yeah, okay, here's another idea. Maybe some way to fight the motivation. Perhaps this social support networks and structures that are not dependent on ideological agreement. Like if people really strongly felt confident that their friendships and their work and family relationships were safe and would not suffer at all no degree of alienation or weakening of relationships from disagreement over political issues, maybe that would remove the incentive.

Does that make sense? Like if people felt that they could disagree with their social group and not not risk anything by doing that, then there would so no longer be a protective motivation in what beliefs you whold so you're saying, basically, make our the social groups, making they're more making them more open to free discussion, more accepting of disagreement. I guess. So, I mean that at least

seems like a possibility. Um. And maybe the way, maybe one way of addressing that is not that you can really change the nature of people's family and friendship relationships like that all that much, but if you could have I don't know, uh, supplemental social dynamics like this may be one thing that community style groups like church congregations and things like that are useful for, and that they provide sort of like outside of the family and the

small friend group, they provide like a backup social situation where you you can retreat if you are feeling down in your other relationships. Though not to say that no certain church congregations have ever made people feel alienated for disagreeing. Oh yeah, I mean, I guess the thing. But you know, I'm just saying, like supplemental social safety nets, I guess right. Well, I could see where different groups, I mean, different social groups can serve as the backup depending on what's happening

in your life. I mean, I can imagine a scenario in which certainly a church could be the the fallback, but also scenarios in which work social group could be the fallback or just uh, you know, your your your home life, so your home, social your family can't times do the fall it. You know, Well, my friends are mad at me because of what I said about but at least ways, at least I'm doing okay work. Uh.

I don't know. It's like one of the ideas, it seems, one of the ideas that comes to mind here is like you'd almost want to have just social groups that are more adherent to scientific insensus. I hate to come back to to that, but because ultimately you have if if that is not present in uh, in one of these social structures, I mean, it's there's going to be a high possibility that some other factor is going to

be more pressing in the worldview. And certainly one sees in religious groups, I mean not all religious groups, but there are certainly religious groups out there, uh that have have beliefs that run very counter to scientific consensus. Now do they do so in a detrimental fashion? I mean that's it's going to depend Yeah, again, I don't. I mean, as with all these questions like Is there any way

to actually engineer that or is that just impossible? Well, no, I think we have We need to create a new religion. That's what we're coming down to, you know. Yeah, the an open discussion science first, religion. Uh, they can just sweep across the sweep across the land from shore to shore and uh and and make a better world for the future. Well, I'll let you carry the croak of priests and profit on that one. But okay, here's maybe one more way another. Basically, I'm just offering different ways

you could approach the motivation problem. I don't know of any specifics that you could create, But here's another way of approaching it. What if there is a way to shield facts from acquiring in the first place what Kahan

and co authors call quote antagonistic cultural meanings. In other words, if you can't fix public and understanding by making people better at science comprehension, and you can't program people not to be incentivized first and foremost by a sense of partisan social belonging, maybe the best way to protect facts is to find a way to never let them become politically charged in the first place. If there's a if somebody could figure out a way to do that or

at least lessen the probability that would happen. That also seems like a very useful thing, a good way to fight this problem. But it may also be impossible because there's again political incentive for people to politicize certain issues. Yeah, I believe Ka Kahan has definitely talked about this before.

I believe he touched on the idea of of not necessarily like outright preventing, but like identifying when it is beginning to take place, and in finding ways to intervene and keep it from being so highly politici because it's like, you know, barnacles building up on a ship or something, right, Yes, like when you detect and maybe you have a process for when you detect that a an empirical scientific question is starting to become an issue of political significance suddenly.

What you want is to get all the politicians and political actors to stop talking about it immediately and instead get politically neutral celebrities and spokespeople and stuff to talk about it. Yeah. I feel like that's a pretty good idea. I think it probably has a thirty three and one third percent chance of success. But if you add that to the forty six and one half percent chance, then you're really getting steinorific. Yeah, you might get up to

chance of winning. You know. One of the things that that can hunt it all right. In their paper that thought was really interesting is that they point out that people, even when experts in other fields are primarily as humans experts about quote, identifying who knows what about what? That sort of is the main way our brains work, right, That's like our primary capacity is figuring out who knows

about what things? Right? Yeah, I mean to come back to Sagan's point of view, you know, it's it's it should be certainly less about trying to figure out who's the authority and just looking at who is the best and expert in a given field and being able to sort of weigh what they're saying and why they're saying it. But oftentimes we use this capacity of looking at who knows what about what not to figure out who has

the real who's got the best expertise to offer? But with the best expertise is saying what I want to hear said exactly, Yes, who is saying what I want to hear said or what my social group believes in the best way, so I can say it the same way anyway, Eugenius is out there, who who can think of more specific and possibly effective ways to undercut the motivation part of motivated reasoning and uh, politically relevant empirical questions?

Let us know what are those ideas you have? Indeed, this is one of those areas where this this hypothesis is so new I don't even think we probably have the science fiction to level at it. So you the listener, will be creating the science fiction uh that might in some way inform what we actually do about it. Yeah, and this whole field identity protective cognition in a way is still developing, so more research could change what seems to be true about it today. But I don't know.

It's one of those where I feel like I'm very interested in this research, but it's not necessarily encouraging. I want to go back to the science comprehension thesis world. I want to live in the place where you can just where you can just tell people more, share more knowledge with more enthusiasm, model the correct kinds of critical thinking and all that and uh and bring people aboard. But it's just not that easy, is it, right? Or

it's just not enough. I mean it kind of comes back though again to the GETA and and and other older works that taught about like self awareness, because that's ultimately what we're talking thing about is new ways to become aware of how our brains are working and how in some cases we our brains our minds are are tricking ourselves into um and clinging to beliefs that simply don't hold up. Yeah. Oh and one of the things,

of course, we've always got to mention. We mentioned this and pretty much anytime we talk about bias or something, you're sitting out there thinking, right now, yeah, this is what other people do. Yeah, but it's we can all look to examples in our own lives. Big ones, small ones, Uh ones you you can't recognize and don't even know you do. Yeah, exactly, I got to remove that plank. Alright. Well, on that note, we're gonna go ahead and close out

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