Sur les sujets controversés, les forts en maths ont tendance à se laisser distraire par leurs croyances politiques.
Je tenais à partager avec vous cette étude. Pour ceux qui ne lisent pas l'anglais, voir ici. Je suis tombé dessus en fouillant au hasard des articles sur le site Slate que j'apprécie particulièrement.
J'aurais du mal à bien traduire tout cet extrait de texte mais si quelqu'un veut s'y mettre, c'est du grain à moudre pour les pirates.
Regardless of the cause, they write, just knowing that it’s happening should make us stop and rethink the way we use data to justify political positions:
For study author Kahan, these results are a fairly strong refutation of what is called the “deficit model” in the field of science and technology studies—the idea that if people just had more knowledge, or more reasoning ability, then they would be better able to come to consensus with scientists and experts on issues like climate change, evolution, the safety of vaccines, and pretty much anything else involving science or data (for instance, whether concealed weapons bans work). Kahan’s data suggest the opposite—that political biases skew our reasoning abilities, and this problem seems to be worse for people with advanced capacities like scientific literacy and numeracy. “If the people who have the greatest capacities are the ones most prone to this, that’s reason to believe that the problem isn’t some kind of deficit in comprehension,” Kahan explained in an interview.
So maybe we can give climate deniers the benefit of the doubt. They’re not stupid, they’re just psychologically committed to their beliefs, in the same way that environmentalists are committed to their own ideology. And it means that just showing them the numbers is never going to be enough to convince them that climate change is real.