As we saw earlier, expertise is no guarantee against this kind of motivated reasoning: Republicans and Democrats with high levels of scientific literacy are further apart on climate change than those with little scientific education. The same disheartening pattern holds from nuclear power to gun control to fracking: the more scientifically literate opponents are, the more they disagree. The same is true for numeracy. “The greater the proficiency, the more acute the polarization,” notes Kahan.4
