How do you measure intelligence? While there's no denying the likes of Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking are some of the brightest people who've ever lived, one person's genius is another person's dunce. Still, there are ways of measuring someone's 'traditional' intelligence.
Speaking on the Veritasium YouTube Channel, Derek Muller said he's fascinated about a scientific paper that points to particular question. Apparently, the 'smarter' you are, the more likely you are to get the question wrong.
The study was conducted by Yale's Dan Kahan, who along with his colleagues, recruited 1,111 Americans to take part. Before being given the all-important question, they were asked a series of other questions to figure out their numeracy skill level.
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The big question was about figuring out whether an experimental skin cream is working, which requires you to use proportional reasoning to get the right answer. Muller points out that the better someone was at maths, the more likely they were to get the question right.
While it all seems pretty cut and dry, the point of the question wasn't to see how numeracy effects our reasoning ability. The thing that ends up skewing the experiment isn't intelligence at all...but politics.
An alternate version of the question was represented to some, but instead of it being about whether a skin cream can improve rashes, it was about whether crime increased or decreased based on gun control. As Muller reminds us, Democrats typically think that gun control reduces crime, while Republicans think it increases it by putting guns in the hands of the wrong people.
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When people were shown the exact same statistics as the skin cream question, it seems reasoning went out of the window and political bias kicked in. One of those asked in the Veritasium video said: "It's kind of obvious, if you have guns in a city, people are going to start shooting people, and if you don't have guns and outlaw them, cities are obviously going to have less crime in them."
Across the board, both Republicans and Democrats with the highest numeracy levels were more likely to be swayed by the answer that aligned with their political leanings.
Kahan says: "The low numeracy people are about 25 percentage points less likely to get the correct answer if that answer is threatening to their ideology than if it's consistent to their ideology.
"The people who are high in numeracy, on the other hand, 45 percentage points less likely to get the right answer."
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Muller says that instead of using a mathematical ability, we're selectively applying it to justify our own beliefs. Kahan points out that the same results apply with other hot topics like fracking and global warming. It suggests that our emotions are getting in the way of numerical intelligence.
The same goes for those who are high in science literacy or open-minded thinking, but as Muller asked people whether their political beliefs could change in the face of actual evidence, most of them argued that it would. Unfortunately, the findings suggest otherwise.
Muller concludes by reminding us: "The truth is that mostly we believe what we believe to fit in with our tribe. And that, in the most important way, is highly rational because humans are very social creatures, and for most of our evolution, we've depended on each other for survival."
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Still, if you fancy yourself as the office brainbox, try out Kahan's question on your co-workers and see what they say.