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.

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