Mooney's revenge?! Is there "asymmetry" in Motivated Numeracy? - Cultural Cognition of Health

Just when I thought I finally had gotten the infernal “ asymmetry thesis ” (AT) out of my system once and for all, this hobgoblin of the science communication problem has re-emerged with all the subtlty and charm of a bad case of shingles.

AT, of course, refers to the claim that ideologically motivated reasoning ( of which cultural cognition is one species or conception ), is not “symmetric” across the ideological spectrum (or cultural spectra) but rather concentrated in individuals of a right-leaning or conservative (or in cultural cognition terms “hierarchical”) disposition.

It is most conspicuously associated with the work of the accomplished political psychologist John Jost, who fnds support for it in the correlation between conservatism and various self-report measures of “dogmatic” thinking. It is also the animating theme of Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain, which presents an elegant and sophisticated synthesis of the social science evidence that supports it.

I don’t buy AT . I’ve explained why 1,312 times in previous blogs, but basically AT doesn’t cohere with the best theory for politically motivated reasoning and is not supported — indeed, is at odds with — the best evidence of how this dynamic operates.

The best theory treats politically motivated reasoning as a form of identity-protective cognition .

People have a big stake–emotionally and materially–in their standing in affinity groups consisting of individuals of like-minded goals and outlooks. When positions on risks or other policy relevant-facts become symbolically identified with membership in and loyalty to those groups, individuals can thus be expected to engage all manner of information–from empirical data to the credibility of advocates to brute sense impressions–in a manner that aligns their beliefs with the ones that predominate in their group.

The kinds of affinity groups that have this sort of significance in people’s lives, however, are not confined to “political parties.”  People will engage information in a manner that reflects a “myside” bias in connection with their status as students of a particular university and myriad other groups important to their identities.

Because these groups aren’t either “liberal” or “conservative”–indeed, aren’t particularly political at all–it would be odd if this dynamic would manifest itself in an ideologically skewed way in settings in which the relevant groups are ones defined in part by commitment to common political or cultural outlooks.

The proof offered for AT, moreover, is not convincing. Jost’s evidence, for example, doesn’t consist in motivated-reasoning experiments, any number of which (like the excellent ones of Jarret Crawford and his collaborators)  have reported findings that display ideological symmetry.

Rather, they are based on correlations between political outlooks and self-report measures of “open-mindedness,” “dogmatism” & the like.

These measures –ones that consist, literally, in people’s willingness to agree or disagree with statements like “thinking is not my idea of fun” & “the notion of thinking abstractly is appealing to me”–are less predictive of the disposition to critically interrogate one’s impressions based on available information than objective or performance-based measures like the Cognitive Reflection Test and Numeracy.  And thse performance-based measures don’t meaningfully correlate with political outlooks.

In addition, while there is plenty of evidence that the disposition to engage in reflective, critical reasoning predicts resistance to a wide array of cognitive bias, there is no evidence that these dispositions predict less vulnerability to politically motivated reasoning.

On the contrary, there is mounting evidence that such dispositions magnify politically motivated reasoning. If the source of this dynamic is the stake people have in forming beliefs that are protective of their status in groups, then we might expect people who know more and and are more adept at making sense of complex evidence to use these capacities to promote the goal of forming identity-protective beliefs.

CCP studies showing that cultural polarization on climate change and other contested risk issues is greater among individuals who are higher in science comprehension, and that individuals who score higher on the Cognitive Reflection Test are more likely to construe evidence in an ideologically biased pattern, support this view.

The Motivated Numeracy experiment furnishes additoinal support for this hypothesis. In it, we instructed subjects to perform a reasoning task–covariance detection–that is known to be a highly discerning measure of the ability and disposition of individuals to draw valid causal inferences from data.

We found that when the problem was styled as one involving the results of an experimental test of the efficacy of a new skin-rash treatment, individuals who score highest in Numeracy– a measure of the ability to engage in critical reasoning on matters involving quantitative information–were much more likely to corretly interpret that data than those who had low or modest Numeracy scores.

But when the problem was styled as one involving the results of gun control ban , those subjects highest in Numeracy did better only when the data presented supported the result (“decreases crime” or “increases crime”) that prevails among persons with their political outlooks (liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, respectively). When the data, properly construed, threatened to trap them in a conclusion at odds with their political outlooks, the high Numeracy people either succumbed to a tempting but lotically specious response to the problem or worked extra hard to pry open some ad hoc, confabulatory escape hatch.

As a result, higher Numeracy experiment subjects ended up even more polarized when considering the same data — data that in fact objectively supported one position more strongly than the other — than subjects who subjects who were less adept at making sense of empirical information.

But … did this result show an ideological asymmetry?!

Lots of people have been telling me they see this in the results. Indeed, one place where they are likely to do so is in workshops (vettings of the paper, essentially, with scholars, students and other curious people), where someone will almost say, “Hey, wait! Aren’t conservative Republicans displaying a greater ‘motivated numeracy’ effect than liberal Democrats? Isn’t that contrary to what you said you found in x paper? Have you called Chris Mooney and admitted you were wrong?”