Relevant quote from popular source:
In Kahan’s experiment, some people were asked to interpret a table of numbers about whether a skin cream reduced rashes, and some people were asked to interpret a different table – containing the same numbers – about whether a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns reduced crime. Kahan found that when the numbers in the table conflicted with people’s positions on gun control, they couldn’t do the math right, though they could when the subject was skin cream. The bleakest finding was that the more advanced that people’s math skills were, the more likely it was that their political views, whether liberal or conservative, made them less able to solve the math problem.
The rash cream experiment is a randomized trial, whereas the concealed-weapon ban is not. That's not enough to explain away the effect, but is consistent with the hypothesis that people put more weight on priors in confusion situations (and people who are better at math find the gun control scenario relatively more confusing).
The bleakest finding was that the more advanced that people’s math skills were, the more likely it was that their political views, whether liberal or conservative, made them less able to solve the math problem.
So, my first thought was that this might be a trivial statement. If any person is 30% likely to give the wrong answer for partisan reasons, but the chance of getting it wrong depends on innumeracy, then partisanship will be the dominant reason for error among highly numerate people, because it's basically the only source of error, even though tota...
This appeared in the news yesterday.
http://www.alternet.org/media/most-depressing-discovery-about-brain-ever?paging=off