Some experimental data on CRT, ideology, and motivated reasoning (probing Mooney's Republican Brain) - Cultural Cognition of Health

This is my about my zillonth post on the so-called “ asymmetry thesis ”—the idea that culturally or ideologically motivated reasoning is concentrated disproportionately at one end of the political spectrum, viz., the right.

But it is also my second post commenting specifically on Chris Mooney’s Republican Brain , which very elegantly and energetically defends the asymmetry thesis. As I said in the first , I disagree with CM’s thesis, but I really really like the book. Indeed, I like it precisely because the cogency, completeness, and intellectual openness of CM’s synthesis of the social science support for the asymmetry thesis helped me to crystallize the basis of my own dissatisfaction with that position and the evidence on which it rests.

I’m not trying to be cute here.

I believe in the Popperian idea that collective knowledge advances through the perpetual dialectic of conjecture and refutation. We learn things through the constant probing and prodding of empirically grounded claims that have themselves emerged from the same sort of challenging of earlier ones.

If this is how things work, then those who succeed in formulating a compelling claim in a manner that enables productive critical engagement create conditions conducive to learning for everyone . They enable those who disagree to more clearly explain why (or show why by collecting their own evidence). And in so doing, they assure those who agree with the claim that it will not evade the sort of persistent testing that is the only basis for their continuing assent to it.

A. Recapping my concern with the existing data

In the last post , I reduced my main reservations with the evidence for the asymmetry thesis to three:

First , I voiced uneasiness with the “quality of reasoning” measures that figure in many of the studies Republic Brain relies on to show conservatives are closed minded or unreflective. Those that rely on dogmatic “personality” styles and on people’s own subjective characterization of their “open-mindedness” or amenability to reasoning are inferior, in my view, to objective, performance-based reasoning measures, particularly Numeracy and the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), which recently haven been shown to be much better predictors of vulnerability to one or another form of cognitive bias. CRT is the measure that figures in Kahneman’s justly famous “fast/slow”-“System 1/2” dual process theory.

Second , and even more fundamentally, I noted that there’s little evidence that any sort of quality of reasoning measure helps to identify vulnerability to motivated cognition—the tendency to unconsciously fit one’s assessment of evidence to some goal or interest extrinsic to forming an accurate belief. Indeed, I pointed out that there is evidence that the people highest in CRT and numeracy are more disposed to display ideologically motivated cognition. Mooney believes—and I agree—that ideologically motivated reasoning is at the root of disputes like climate change. But if the disposition to engage in higher quality, reflective reasoning doesn’t immunize people from motivated reasoning, then one can’t infer anything about disputes like climate change from studies that correlate the disposition to engage in higher quality, reflective reasoning with ideology..

Third, we should be relying instead on experiments that test for motivated reasoning directly. I suggested that many experiments that purport to find evidence of motivated reasoning aren’t well designed. They measure only whether people furnished with arguments change their minds; that’s consistent with unbiased as well as biased assessments of the evidence at hand. To be valid proof of motivated reasoning, studies must manipulate the ideological motivation subjects have for crediting one and the same piece of evidence.  Studies that do this show that conservatives and liberals both opportunisitically adjust their weighting of evidence conditional on its support for ideologically satisfying conclusions.

B. Some more data for consideration

Okay. Now I will present some evidence from a study that I designed with all three of these points—ones, again, that Mooney’s book convinced me are the nub of the matter—in mind.

That study tests three hypotheses:

(1) that there isn’t a meaningful connection between ideology and the disposition to use higher level, systematic cognition (“System 2” reasoning, in Kahneman’s terms) or open-mindedness, as measured by CRT;

(2) that a properly designed study will show that liberals as well as conservatives are prone to motivated reasoning on one particular form of policy-relevant scientific evidence: studies purporting to find that quality-of-reasoning measures show those on one or the other side of the climate-change debate are “closed minded” and unreflective; and

(3) that a disposition to engage in higher-level cognition (as measured by CRT) doesn’t counteract but in fact magnifies ideologically motivated cognition.

1. Relationship of CRT to ideology

This study involved a diverse national sample of U.S. adults ( N = 1,750). I collected data on various demographic characteristics, including the subjects self-reported ideology and political-party allegiance.  And I had the subjects complete the CRT test.

I’ve actually done this before, finding only tiny and inconclusive correlations between ideology, culture, and party-affiliating, on the one hand, and CRT, on the other.

The same was true this time. Consistent with the first hypothesis, there was no meaningful correlation between CRT and either liberal-conservative ideology (measured with a standard 5-point scale) or cultural individualism (measured with our CC worldview scales).