New research suggests that scientific curiosity could be the key to curing polarized opinions and unyielding biases, Brian Resnick writes for Vox. Yale Law professor Dan Kahan was working on a project to measure individual levels of scientific curiosity when he discovered, to his surprise, that the more curious an individual was about the universe and its wonders, the more open they were to accepting opinions that contradict their beliefs. Participants in Kahan’s survey (divided into liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans) who displayed higher levels of scientific curiosity appeared to be less biased in their answers than those more knowledgeable. In addition to questions meant to gauge science knowledge and curiosity, Kahan also asked about more “politically charged [issues] that tend to polarize even the smartest of partisans,” such as gun control or climate change. Interestingly enough, the research also found that the more knowledgeable the partisans were, the more their answers tended to diverge. “There’s a gulf in the answers between highly intelligent Democrats and Republicans… the most curious [of them] are not as polarized on the question.” The results of Kahan’s latest research on scientific curiosity complement his earlier work on the relationship between knowledge and partisan bias, which showed, to his great concern, that politics can actually make a smart person stupid, or more articulately, that “partisanship has a way of short-circuiting intelligence.”

The phenomenon “politically motivated reasoning,” which Kahan believes is “the source of persistent public conflict over policy-relevant facts,” means that people tend to use their wits to be right rather than correct, when faced with information that threatens their belief systems and identity. In the case of Kahan’s previous experiment, “being better at math made partisans less likely to solve the problem correctly when solving it meant betraying their political instincts.” While those findings are unsurprising for Kahan, he believes they are dangerous, as he also admits that “at any given moment some fractions of the things I believe [are] for identity protective purposes.” But being conscious of it is one way to mitigate its effect. That is not to say that anyone should go on making radical changes to the way they think, but until further studies are conducted, Kahan is asking people to begin to “value scientific curiosity more in politics and in life.