Being Smart and Knowledgeable Doesn't Make You a Scout

BEING SMART AND KNOWLEDGEABLE DOESN’T MAKE YOU A SCOUT

“What an idiot,” we exclaim when someone shares an exceptionally wrongheaded opinion on Facebook. “I guess people don’t care about facts and evidence anymore,” we sigh when we read about some trendy pseudoscientific belief. Journalists write somber essays about the public’s “cult of ignorance” and “anti-intellectualism,” and publish books with titles like Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.

Language like this seems to imply that the problem with our discourse—the reason so many people have the “wrong” views on controversial topics—is a lack of knowledge and reasoning ability. If only people were smarter and more well-informed, they would realize their errors!

But is that true? Yale law professor Dan Kahan surveyed Americans about their political views and their beliefs about climate change. As you would expect, those two things were highly correlated. Liberal Democrats were much more likely than conservative Republicans to agree with the statement “There is solid evidence of recent global warming due mostly to human activity such as burning fossil fuels.”*

So far, not surprising. The twist is that Kahan also measured his respondents’ “science intelligence” with a collection of different questions: Some were puzzles designed to test reasoning ability, such as “If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” Other questions were tests of basic scientific knowledge, such as “Lasers work by focusing sound waves—true or false?” and “Which gas makes up most of the earth’s atmosphere: Hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or oxygen?”

If knowledge and intelligence protect you from motivated reasoning, then we would expect to find that the more people know about science, the more they agree with each other about scientific questions. Kahan found the opposite. At the lowest levels of scientific intelligence, there’s no polarization at all—roughly 33 percent of both liberals and conservatives believe in human-caused global warming. But as scientific intelligence increases, liberal and conservative opinions diverge. By the time you get to the highest percentile of scientific intelligence, liberal belief in human-caused global warming has risen to nearly 100 percent, while conservative belief in it has fallen to 20 percent.

The same funnel-shaped pattern shows up when you ask people for their opinions on other ideologically charged scientific issues: Should the government fund stem cell research? How did the universe begin? Did humans evolve from lower animal species? On all these questions, the people with the highest levels of scientific intelligence were also the most politically polarized in their opinions.

Figure captions (images not included): As science intelligence increases, liberals and conservatives diverge over whether there is “SOLID EVIDENCE” of human-caused global warming. Adapted from Kahan (2017), figure 8, page 1012. On ideologically charged scientific issues—stem cell research, the Big Bang, and human evolution—more knowledgeable people are more politically polarized. Adapted from Drummond & Fischhoff (2017), figure 1, page 4.

From the way I’m talking about polarization, some readers might infer that I think the truth always lies in the center. I don’t; that would be false balance. On any particular issue, the truth may lie close to the far left or the far right or anywhere else. The point is simply that as people become better informed, they should start to converge on the truth, wherever it happens to be. Instead, we see the opposite pattern—as people get better informed, they diverge.

This is a crucially important result, because being smart and being knowledgeable on a particular topic are two more things that give us a false sense of security in our own reasoning. A high IQ and an advanced degree might give you an advantage in ideologically neutral domains like solving math problems or figuring out where to invest your money. But they won’t protect you from bias on ideologically charged questions.

Speaking of which . . . the question “Are some people more prone to bias than others?” is itself ideologically charged. And sure enough, researchers who study bias fall prey to the very phenomenon they’re studying.

For decades, it’s been common wisdom among psychologists that conservatives are inherently more prone to bias than liberals. It’s called the “rigidity of the right” theory, that conservatism attracts people with certain innate personality traits: closed-mindedness, authoritarianism, dogmatism, fear of change and novelty. It’s an irresistible theory if you’re a liberal—which academic psychologists overwhelmingly are. A recent survey of social and personality psychologists found that the ratio of self-identified liberals to conservatives was almost 14 to 1.

Perhaps that has something to do with why the field as a whole was so willing to accept the “rigidity of the right” theory even though the research behind it is dubious, to say the least. Check out some of the questions that are typically used to determine whether someone has a “rigid” personality:

• Do you agree that “homosexuals and feminists should be praised for being brave enough to defy ‘traditional family values’”? If not, then you’re rigid.
• Do you favor the death penalty? If so, you’re rigid.
• Do you favor socialism? Legalized abortion? If not, then yup, you guessed it—you’re rigid.

Hopefully, you’ll be quicker to recognize the problem with this research than academic psychologists were. These questions are supposedly measuring rigidity, but they’re actually measuring whether you hold conservative beliefs. Which means that the theory that conservatives have more rigid personalities than liberals isn’t an empirical finding at all—it’s a tautology.

Intelligence and knowledge are just tools. You can use those tools to help you see the world clearly, if that’s what you’re motivated to do. Or you can use them to defend a particular viewpoint, if you’re motivated to do that instead. But there’s nothing inherent to the tools that makes you a scout.