It's a Scientific Fact: Political Comments Sections Are Making You Dumber

And Republicans are statistically the worst offenders

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Anyone who has been on the Internet (ever) know that political views on the web can err on the side of vitriolic. Comments sections for news items completely unrelated to anything having to do with American politicscan become politicized battlegrounds, creating a widespread culture of Us Vs. Them.

You may be thrilled to learn, however, that both sides are equally bad at math because: the stronger your political beliefs are, the more it makes you stupid.

Over 1,000 people participated in a study that presented them with two mathematical word problems. One spoke of a hand cream, the other about "a law banning private citizens from carrying concealed handguns in public." They were the exact same problem except for the language used.

The study found that a person's brain can do the math just fine but that if the correct answer doesn't back up what they originally believed, that person would do mental gymnastics to make their preferable answer correct. Chris Mooney of Mother Jones Magazine hypothesizes that "more numerate people perform better when identifying study results that support their views—but may have a big blind spot when it comes to identifying results that undermine those views."

Ultimately, the study found that more Republicans (sorry, folks!) had a harder time accepting the correct answer. That's the fact, Jack. One might argue that this "denial" thing is a running pattern within the Republican party.

The study doesn't let liberals off the hook, though: A much lesser (but still notable) percentage of liberals got the problem wrong, too, when the answer didn't go their way. So while left-wing fact-beacons such as Ezra Klein and Nate Silver may be good with math, it doesn't mean Democrats as a whole are any less susceptible to the science of denial. They're just a lot better at hiding it than Republicans.

There aren't Republican versions of, say, Nate Silver—the blogger who accurately predicted Obama's landslide 2012 win—largely because a lot of Republican rhetoric is based on emotion rather than cold, hard fact. But one could say the same about much of the Southern Democratic party during the Civil War, who were totally for slavery—or practically any political point that a percentage of the population gets so worked up about that they can barely see the facts past their own rhetoric.

It'd be easy—and now accurate—to then point out that Republicans often pander to a culture of fear and emotion. But Democrats are much more susceptible to another one of their emotions: the self-satisfaction of being right. Take this journalistic nugget from a 2009 article by The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder about the beginning of the Republicans fight against the Affordable Care Act (and the emphasis is ours):

The pro-reform side is appealing to emotion, too -- albeit a wholly different emotion -- the self-satisfaction one feels when one believes one has rationally deliberated something and meaningfully contributed to an important public debate. This is called a solidary incentive. It's a powerful -- and often completely ignored -- sentiment, one that the Obama presidential campaign found, capitalized on, and won the election by exploiting.

The Democrats and Obama assume that, inside every voter who isn't an instinctive partisan, there is a competition of sorts -- a calculus, subject to outside influences: If the voter succumbs to the fear-emotion, he or she will retreat into a comfortable partisan shell. If the voter is convinced that the partisan games are wrong, the voter will seek refuse (sic) in a side that more closely aligns with different values.

For the right to win the health care fight, they'll want to speed up the voters' decision-making. The more quickly the voter accesses certain emotions, the harder it is to slow down, reassess, and access different ones.

Perhaps the real finding in the study is this: the more fringe and rabid your political views are, the more likely you are to suck at math.

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