Citation

Stagnaro MN, Tappin BM, Rand DG. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2023; 120(32): e2301491120.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2301491120

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The highly influential theory of "Motivated System 2 Reasoning" argues that analytical, deliberative ("System 2") reasoning is hijacked by identity when considering ideologically charged issues--leading people who are more likely to engage in such reasoning to be more polarized, rather than more accurate. Here, we fail to replicate the key empirical support for this theory across five contentious issues, using a large gold-standard nationally representative probability sample of Americans. While participants were more accurate in evaluating a contingency table when the outcome aligned with their politics (even when controlling for prior beliefs), we find that participants with higher numeracy were more accurate in evaluating the contingency table, regardless of whether or not the table's outcome aligned with their politics. These findings call for a reconsideration of the effect of identity on analytical reasoning.

Here, we assess this possibility by providing the first independent preregistered test of the replicability of the original finding using a gold-standard representative probability sample of Americans. Importantly, we conferred with one of the original authors from refs. 2 and 3 and confirmed that the AmeriSpeak panel provides sufficiently representative samples for this replication to satisfy earlier critiques regarding representativeness. Our sample is also twice as large as the original study, providing additional statistical power.

Furthermore, we assess the generalizability of the original finding by examining gun control as well as four additional topics that pretesting indicates are highly polarizing for both Democrats and Republicans. Finally, we investigate the alternative explanation for the pattern observed in the original study, which involves numeracy being associated with greater deference to prior factual beliefs rather than identity (4). Preregistration available at https://aspredicted.org/f7jw6.pdf.

Language: en