I’ll See It When I Believe It: Motivated Numeracy in Perceptions of Climate Change Risk^*

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

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

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Matthew S. Nurse http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1787-5914

Will J. Grant http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9674-6488

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

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

1 Note this study was first published in 2013 and re-published in 2017.

2 Note that Figure 2(a) appears to show a motivated reasoning effect among One Nation supporters in the control “Rash decreases” condition. It is unclear why this may be the case, and may indeed be simply a statistical artefact. Alternatively, it may be the case that the skin care control question may not be politically neutral in some Australian populations. Therefore, we have used the “Rash increases” control condition for the rest of our analyses as it most closely represents the “skin cream” control conditions found by other motivated numeracy researchers (Ballarini and Sloman, 2017; Fuller, 2015; Kahan and Peters, 2017; Kahan, et al., 2017; Sumner, et al., 2019).

3 We note that there is some debate about the choice of model selection criteria. Given the current investigation is considering matters of social science we do not consider the “true model” is in the candidate set, and therefore we have chosen to use the AIC method rather than other methods such as BIC. See Brandt et al. (2004)

4 Washburn and Skitka (2018) estimated that the sample size of at least 1036 is required for statistical power of at least 0.95 when attempting to replicate Kahan, et al. (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.