On this site we like our cites and set our sights on using them to back up our positions on contentious issues such as gun control, climate change, and political partisanship. After all, when it comes to eradicating ignorance, knowledge is supposedly attained through enlightenment. Show me the numbers, as it were.
Sadly, a new research paper from Yale law school professor Dan Kahan entitled Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government reveals two things which The Huffington Post calls the “Most Depressing Brain Finding Ever.”
From what Kahan found, people given the same math problems give very different responses if the math problem pertains to a political issue that the subject is passionate about.
The Huffington Post article also goes on to cite the work of Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth.
Author Marty Kaplan, Director of the Norman Lear Center and Professor at the USC Annenberg School, makes the following sobering conclusion:
Now, it’s easy to take this information and gleefully point out folks on the other side of issues that we hold dear. When I first read it, my first instinct was to say to myself, “Well, this explains adaher.” But the fact is that your tree-hugging, Rachel Maddow-watching, Obama-supporting friends are just as likely to be rendered fact-repellent by partisan blindfolds as your crazy uncle who watches Fox News religiously.
Now, I fancy myself as a logical type. I like to think that if evidence mandated it, I would change my views on topics no matter how dear I hold them. But maybe I’m fooling myself… and maybe you are too?
Or maybe we are the outliers, people who can get past partisanship and examine facts on their own merits and come to conclusions based on them alone, without letting dogmatic prejudices get in the way of this. I changed my views on home schooling when I saw that home-schooled kids did pretty well. My views on American involvement overseas are evolving as well.
But even if you, like I, can point out that we are the outliers, what hope do we have as outliers in a world filled with true believers? Is fighting ignorance a proposition doomed from the start because we, as a species, prefer to find comfort in falsehood rather than accept painful truths? And if that’s the case, how the hell did we make it this far?