Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues set out to study the relationship between political views, scientific knowledge or reasoning abilities, and opinions on contested scientific issues like global warming. In their study, more than 1,500 randomly selected Americans were asked about their political worldviews and their opinions about how dangerous global warming and nuclear power are. But that's not all: They were also asked standard questions to determine their degree of scientific literacy (e.g, "Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria—true or false?") as well as their numeracy or capacity for mathematical reasoning (e.g., "If Person A's chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in 10 years, and person B's risk is double that of A, what is B's risk?").
The result was stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.
Instead, here was the result. If you were already part of a cultural group predisposed to distrust climate science—e.g., a political conservative or "hierarchical-individualist"—then more science knowledge and more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even more dismissive. Precisely the opposite happened with the other group—"egalitarian-communitarians" or liberals—who tended to worry more as they knew more science and math. The result was that, overall, more scientific literacy and mathematical ability led to greater political polarization over climate change—which, of course, is precisely what we see in the polls.
---SPSmith
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