I’ll See It When I Believe It: Highly numerate people who receive scientific data about Anthropogenic Climate Change use motivated numeracy to rationalize their interpretations in line with their attitudes

I’ll See It When I Believe It: Motivated Numeracy in Perceptions of Climate Change Risk. Matthew S. Nurse & Will J. Grant. Environmental Communication, Jun 16 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2019.1618364

ABSTRACT: People’s attitudes about Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) risks are not only influenced by scientific data, such as the likelihood of harm, the consequences of failing to act and the cost and effectiveness of mitigation. Instead, when people receive information about controversial topics of decision-relevant science like ACC they often defer to their political attitudes. Recent research has shown that more numerate people can be more polarized about these topics despite their better ability to interpret the scientific data. In this study, we investigated whether the motivated numeracy effect originally found by Kahan, Peters, Dawson, and Slovic [2017. Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Behavioural Public Policy, 1(1)] on the controversial topic of gun control laws in the United States also applies to people when assessing ACC risks. This randomized controlled experiment (N = 504) of Australian adults extends the motivated reasoning thesis by finding evidence that highly numerate people who receive scientific data about ACC use motivated numeracy to rationalize their interpretations in line with their attitudes.

KEYWORDS: Climate change communication, motivated numeracy, motivated reasoning, identity-protective cognition, rejection of science

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7300430


Check also
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The key mechanism that generates scientific polarization involves treating evidence generated by other agents as uncertain when their beliefs are relatively different from one’s own:

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Keywords: politically motivated reasoning, curiosity, science communication, risk perception

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