The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

by Tim Harford

After a long and fruitless search for an antidote to tribalism, Kahan could be forgiven for becoming jaded.[5] Yet a few years ago, to his surprise, he and his colleagues stumbled upon a trait that some people have—and that other people can be encouraged to develop—that inoculates us against this toxic polarization. On the most politically polluted, tribal questions, where intelligence and education fail, this trait does not. And if you’re desperately, burningly curious to know what it is—congratulations. You may be inoculated already. Curiosity breaks the relentless pattern. Specifically, Kahan identified “scientific curiosity.” That’s different from scientific literacy. The two qualities are correlated, of course, but there are curious people who know rather little about science (yet), and highly trained people with little appetite to learn more. More scientifically curious Republicans aren’t further apart from Democrats on these polarized issues. If anything, they’re slightly closer together. It’s important not to exaggerate the effect. Curious Republicans and Democrats still disagree on issues such as climate change—but the more curious they are, the more they converge on what we might call an evidence-based view of the issues in question. Or to put it another way, the more curious we are, the less our tribalism seems to matter.