Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Full Version: Do political beliefs affect our ability to crunch numbers? (motivated numeracy)
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critic...oliticized

EXCERPT: . . . Some of the participants got the skin cream story. Others got a different story. It was about a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public. Some cities had this ban in place, while others did not. Some cities saw a decrease in crime, while others did not. You probably know where this is going.

The same table as above was presented to them [see article]. The numbers were identical but the labels changed. Some cities with the ban saw an increase in crime while others saw a decrease, and some cities that did not enact the ban likewise saw an increase or a decrease in criminality. Did the ban work?

According to the numbers, the ban did not work. Crime increased more in the cities that had adopted this handgun ban. But political affiliation played a trick on the study participants. Before they were presented with the fictional scenario, participants were asked to fill out standard questionnaires to determine their political affiliations and their numeracy. When the researchers looked at their conservative Republican participants, the higher their numeracy score (i.e. the better they were at understanding and playing with numbers in general), the more likely they were to report that the ban had indeed not worked. The most numerate among them would crunch the numbers the right way, calculate percentages, and see the true answer.

But for the liberal Democrat participants? Their numeracy score did not help them. Whether they were good with numbers or not had little impact on their conclusion. They looked at that table and fewer than half reported that the ban had not worked.

Before conservative readers use this as evidence of superiority, the researchers of course flipped the script. Some of the research participants saw the exact same numbers but labelled in such a way that made the ban work in reducing crime. The results were flipped as well. Democrats were better at figuring it out if they were good at math, but math skills did not help Republicans much. If instead of a handgun ban they had been shown data about skin cream, there was no real difference between Democrats and Republicans. Both groups were better at figuring out the real answer if their mathematical ability was high, as long as the topic was a non-political topical ointment.

This study provides one more piece of evidence in a larger body of work that shows us how important protecting our identity is. If I belong to an important group that believes that banning handguns is wrong and would not work to reduce crime, and I am faced with data that points in the other direction, I may be inclined to not think about the data too much.

As we saw earlier with the skin cream example, it is so tempting to glance at the numbers and draw a quick (but wrong) conclusion. We need to shift to a more analytical gear in our brain to fully consider what to do with the numbers to arrive at the right conclusion. If my tribal affiliation is more important to me than arriving at the truth, I can take a shortcut and report that the data agrees with me. But if it’s the shortcut that threatens my group’s beliefs and I am good enough at math, I can pause, rethink the problem, and calculate the percentages to arrive at an answer that is both accurate and acceptable to my tribe.

We are all susceptible to this “motivated numeracy,” as it has been called. It is sobering and nerve-racking to realize that numbers can so easily be analyzed by the brain in whichever way reassures us.

Take-home message:
-Numeracy is the ability to engage with numbers and information that contains numbers in a range of situations in everyday life.
-Motivated numeracy is when the brain starts with a conclusion it likes and treats numbers in a way that will conform to this conclusion. (MORE - details on the study)
The difference is that Republicans likely already knew that the numbers showing handgun bans worked were false, and that those showing they did not were closer to real-world numbers. Did the study account for the actual knowledge of the participants?