Do Statistical Rules Interfere with Political Beliefs?

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that individuals heavily rely on their own political attitudes and thus underweight appropriate evidence or normative rules. Such an effect of prior beliefs on reasoning is assumed as evidence of ideological blindness and reasoning impairment. Across 3 preregistered experiments (N = 1030), we examined whether individuals are truly insensitive to evidence inconsistent with their political views. Participants, including climate believers and deniers (Experiments 1 and 2), and pro- and anti-vaxxers (Experiment 3), were presented with a series of base-rate arguments with neutral, climate, or COVID-19 vaccine contents and were asked to evaluate them either based on their beliefs or statistical rules. The results showed that climate deniers and anti-vaxxers were not impacted by their political beliefs in their reasoning as the conflict between statistical rules (i.e., base-rates) and diagnostic information did not interfere with their statistical judgments. More importantly, regardless of an argument’s content, such a conflict interfered with belief-based judgments. These findings contradict the notion that ideology impairs reasoning and suggest that individuals’ judgments are less impacted by background beliefs than has been assumed previously, and more importantly, reasoners are still sensitive to normative rules that disagree with their beliefs, even on ideological topics.

Illusory intuitive inferences: Matching heuristics explain logical intuitions

“…For example, across 5 experiments, Handley et al (2011) found a conflict effect under belief instructions, indicating that individuals were more accurate on non-conflict than conflict arguments. Similarly, Pennycook et al (2014) and Ghasemi, Roberts, and Handley (2022) replicated this finding with base-rate arguments, whereby conflicting base rates interfered with judgments based upon stereotyped descriptions. This standard conflict effect, which is considered evidence of intuitive logic, is observed across a range of reasoning arguments, experimental designs, and argument contents (Howarth et al, 2019;Ricco et al, 2020;Thompson et al, 2018;Trippas et al, 2017).…”

Logical intuitions or matching heuristic? Examining the effect of deduction training on belief-based reasoning judgments

“…As the researchers have argued, it seems that the logical structures of these arguments are accessible enough to interfere with belief judgments. This interference effect, the logic-belief effect, is considered an indicator of intuitive logic (for applications of this paradigm to statistical judgments and base-rate arguments, see Ghasemi, Roberts, et al, 2022;Pennycook et al, 2014).…”