My Take | Political beliefs in young do not add up

Recent research in psychology has found that the more radical or committed you are, the less able you are to reason logically and do simple maths that may relate to your political beliefs. If this line of research proves true, I think it’s a pretty good argument to shield young pupils up to senior secondary school from political involvement. I would have extended it to university but since such students are adults, they are free to choose.

In one study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science last year, two psychologists from the University of Virginia and University of California, Irvine, discovered people found it difficult to think logically about arguments, data or evidence that contradicted their politics, and the more committed they were, the worse their results.

They concluded: “Beliefs shape how people interpret information and may impair how people engage in logical reasoning. In three studies, we show how ideological beliefs impair people’s ability to: (1) recognise logical validity in arguments that oppose their political beliefs, and, (2) recognise the lack of logical validity in arguments that support their political beliefs. We observed belief bias effects among liberals and conservatives who evaluated the logical soundness of classically structured logical syllogisms supporting liberal or conservative beliefs.

“Both liberals and conservatives frequently evaluated the logical structure of entire arguments based on the believability of arguments’ conclusions, leading to predictable patterns of logical errors. As a result, liberals were better at identifying flawed arguments supporting conservative beliefs [and vice versa].”

In another study, “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government”, published in Yale University’s Behavioural Public Policy series in 2013, people were asked to draw conclusions from data requiring calculations of ratios and percentages. In one question, they were given data about the effectiveness of a skin cream on rash. In another, they were given similar data, but instead they were asked about the effectiveness of gun control on crime.

Those who were bad at maths performed poorly in both tests. Those who were good at maths did well in the first question, regardless of their politics. But in the second question, their mathematical results declined as data conflicted with their political beliefs.