The article "How politics makes us stupid" was recommended to us by our niece who writes for the NY Times. Very counterintuitive, and excellent food for thought in a culture as highly polarized as our own. Here are some excerpts ...
People weren’t reasoning to get the right answer; they were reasoning to get the answer that they wanted to be right ...
... our reasoning becomes rationalizing when we’re dealing with questions where the answers could threaten our tribe — or at least our social standing in our tribe. And in those cases, Kahan says, we’re being perfectly sensible when we fool ourselves ...
Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse. Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. ... The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.
... our reasoning becomes rationalizing when we’re dealing with questions where the answers could threaten our tribe — or at least our social standing in our tribe. And in those cases, Kahan says, we’re being perfectly sensible when we fool ourselves ...
Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test. Now it was ideology that drove the answers. Liberals were extremely good at solving the problem when doing so proved that gun-control legislation reduced crime. But when presented with the version of the problem that suggested gun control had failed, their math skills stopped mattering. They tended to get the problem wrong no matter how good they were at math. Conservatives exhibited the same pattern — just in reverse. Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. ... The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.