Abstract
Motivated numeracy refers to the idea that people with high reasoning capacity will use that capacity selectively to process information in a manner that protects their own valued beliefs. This concept was introduced in a now classic article by Kahan, Peters, Dawson, & Slovic [2017, Behavioral Public Policy 1, 54–86], who used numeracy to index reasoning capacity, and demonstrated that the tendency to engage in ideologically congruent interpretation of facts increased substantially with people's numeracy. Despite the importance of this finding, both from a theoretical and practical point of view, there is yet no consensus in the literature about the factual strength of motivated numeracy. We therefore conducted a large-scale replication of Kahan, Peters, Dawson, and Slovic (2017), using a pre-specified analysis plan with strict evaluation criteria. We did not find good evidence for motivated numeracy; there are distinct patterns in our data at odds with the core predictions of the theory, most notably (i) there is ideologically congruent responding that is not moderated by numeracy, and (ii) when there is moderation, ideologically congruent responding occurs only at the highest levels of numeracy. Our findings suggest that the cumulative evidence for motivated numeracy is weaker than previously thought, and that caution is warranted when this feature of human cognition is leveraged to improve science communication on contested topics such as climate change or immigration.
Highlights
A fundamental premise of modern democratic society is that people are willing and able to accept empirical facts and to interpret new in formation in an unbiased manner
A highly influential source of empirical support for the hypothesis of identity-protective cognition is the paper by Kahan et al (2017), who link motivated reasoning to numeric ability, establishing the concept of motivated numeracy
We conducted a large-scale preregistered replication of Kahan et al (2017), who found that motivated reasoning about the probable effects of a gun ban on violent crime was more pronounced in individuals with high numeric ability; a phenomenon that has been called motivated numeracy
Summary
A fundamental premise of modern democratic society is that people are willing and able to accept empirical facts and to interpret new in formation in an unbiased manner. A surprising finding in the literature is that motivated reasoning, or partisan disagreement more generally, seems to be more pronounced in people with relatively high levels of scientific knowledge, education, or analytic ability (Drummond & Fischhoff, 2017; Kahan et al, 2012; Kuru, Pasek, & Traugott, 2017; Taber & Lodge, 2006; van Boven et al, 2019; van der Linden, Leiserowitz, & Maibach, 2018) This finding has been rational ized as a type of identity-protective cognition, where individuals use their intelligence and reasoning skills selectively when assessing new information, seeking support for their own valued beliefs (Kahan, 2013; Kahan et al, 2012; Kahan et al, 2017; Kahan, Jenkins-Smith, & Braman, 2011; Landrum, Lull, Akin, Hasell, & Jamieson, 2017). We conducted a large-scale preregistered replication of Kahan et al (2017) to investigate the replicability of the motivated-numeracy effect
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