Dan M. Kahan and colleagues write,
If high Numeracy subjects use their special cognitive advantage selectively—only when doing so generates an ideological congenial answer but not otherwise—they will end up even more polarized than their low numeracy counterparts. Such a result, while highly counterintuitive from the perspective of SCT [“science comprehension thesis”], would be consistent with the view of a smaller group of scholars who take the view that identity-protective cognition operates on both heuristic and systematic—System 1 and System 2—forms of infor-mation processing (Cohen 2003; Giner-Sorolla & Chaiken 1997; Chen, Duckworth & Chaiken 1999; Kahan 2013). It would also be consistent with, and help to explain, results from observational studies showing that the most science comprehending citizens are the most polarized on issues like climate change and nuclear power.
Read the draft paper. I got to the link from Jonathan Haidt, which in turn I got to from Tyler Cowen.
I think that there is a general moral here, but I am not sure how to phrase it. Maybe something along the lines of, “Try to find the holes in your own most strongly-held beliefs.”
“I had also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely that whenever published fact, a new observation of thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.” -Charles Darwin
Historically, the priesthood has always attracted the brainiest amongst us.
One should, but is there any reason to expect one can? If one thinks so, may one not just be fooling oneself?
Give them pointed motivation and watch them snap a into focus. For example, who wants to bet on global warming? Incentives make the need to be precise and accurate salient.
On the other hand, give a smartie pants a bullhorn and a biased audience and…solve for the equilibrium.
I just finished reading your “three languages of politics” and macroeconomic memoir back to back. I’m starting to think that was a mistake. In the memoir you give almost every economic school of thought a well-deserved hard time. It’s clear you are criticizing everyone for engaging in motivated reasoning and for being in self-denial as to that reality. I’ll grant that you are being as professional, polite, charitable, and generous as someone pursuing a very justifiable ‘pox on all their houses’ thesis can be.
But, of course, these schools of thought are all extremely highly correlated with political orientations. And in three languages what appears on the surface to be a general appeal for self-awareness, intellectual discipline, civility in discourse, and more constructive reasoning seems, after reading the memoir, to be a very sly but subversive (Straussian?) way to also criticize everyone else for being persistently irrational and biased and reveal them to be political actors wolves merely wearing the sheep’s clothing of disinterested academics and rational judges searching for objective truth.
The least offensive way to make the accusation of ubiquitous yet unacknowledged bias that is pervasive on all sides in a profession is to excuse it as merely ‘all too human’.
It also made me wonder about the timing and reasons behind your departure from EconLog.
When I read blog posts like this one, however, it reminds me that even if you are being sly and gentle in your criticisms, you still genuinely care about encouraging people to be more objective and less reflexively partisan (and without realizing or admitting it). Maybe I’m being fooled and it’s possible that you are merely preserving ‘never spontaneous examines weaknesses in his own arguments and is thus probably biased’ as a clever rhetorical device.
My solution is perfectly uncertain. My theory says that I should be wrong now and then if I am ever right.