ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
No association between numerical ability and politically motivated reasoning in a large US probability sample.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Susceptibility to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis of demographic and psychological factors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Pooled it
- Pro-Science Beliefs: The Role of Analytic Thinking and Epistemic Values.Scandinavian journal of psychology · 2025Article
- Susceptibility to poor arguments: The interplay of cognitive sophistication and attitudes.Memory & cognition · 2024Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.