WS MoreOrLess: Does politics make us get our sums wrong?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 9 November 2013
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
To what degree do our personal opinions cloud our judgement? Yale University researchers have attempted to detect and measure how our political beliefs affect our ability to make rational decisions. The study suggests that our ability to do maths plummets when we are looking at data which clashes with our worldview. Ruth Alexander and Ben Carter consider Professor Dan Kahan's findings. This programme was first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the short edition of Morales. |
| 0:02.0 | First broadcast on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:06.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:09.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use |
| 0:13.0 | go to BBCWorldService.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:19.0 | Hello and welcome to Morales on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:23.0 | I'm Ruth Alexander. I'm Ben Carter's also here. |
| 0:26.0 | With a question for you and the listeners. |
| 0:28.0 | You might want to take a pen and jot down some notes. |
| 0:31.0 | Okay, that kind of question, right? |
| 0:33.0 | Okay, imagine this. |
| 0:35.0 | Medical researchers have developed two new creams for treating skin rashes. |
| 0:39.0 | One made out of strawberries, one made out of bananas. |
| 0:42.0 | All right, unusual, okay. |
| 0:44.0 | We need to test how these creams work. |
| 0:46.0 | So we have two groups of people who all have a skin rash. |
| 0:50.0 | One group is given the strawberry cream, the other group is given the banana cream. |
| 0:54.0 | Okay. |
| 0:55.0 | Now let's look at how the two groups of people got home with their skin creams. |
| 0:59.0 | In the group who use strawberry cream, 200 people got better and 100 got worse. |
| 1:04.0 | Okay, 200 better, 100 worse in the strawberry group. |
| 1:09.0 | Yep. |
... |
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