Advanced education associated with poor decision-making hygiene

There are multiple statements and studies that I have seen in the past few hours which coalesce into a fairly jaundiced aggregate view of the self-perception of educated elites. There is a grave tendency for policy arguments to devolve into sophisticated slander of one's opponent and ad hominem attacks rather than engaging with the policy argument and its attendant evidentiary issues.

The science communication problem: one good explanation, four not so good ones, and a fitting solution by Dan Kahan

Kahan addresses four popular explanations for public policy disagreement. These popular explanations for opponents taking different positions are all really forms of ad hominem attacks in that they do not engage with the actual argument but instead attempt to demonstrate the defectiveness of the opponent. Kajan indicates why each of these explanations is inadequate and unsupported by evidence. The four arguments are:

* Science Denialism (my opponent is stupid)
* Misinformation (my opponent is gullible)
* Bounded Rationality (my opponent is ignorant)
* Authoritarian personality (my opponent is a subservient follower)

In a second paper from Kahane, Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection: An Experimental Study, he concludes that

subjects who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition

A while ago, I posted about the proclivity of the most educated tend to make worse financial decisions than others (Course credit wise, financially foolish).

But college-educated people were more likely than those with high school or less education to be above this 40 percent threshold - considered to be a risky amount of debt for most households.

The association between more education and higher debt was true even after taking into account the fact that people with more education tend to have higher incomes.

Finally George Will has an opinion column (Colleges have free speech on the run) citing a researcher indicating that

those with the highest levels of education have the lowest exposure to people with conflicting points of view.

I can't find an original citation on that research.

Collected together these seem to indicate that advanced education is associated with poor decision-making hygiene. The drumbeat of coincidental articles is striking - the more educated you are, the more likely you are to interpret things through an ideological filter, the more likely you are to misinterpret risks, and the less likely you are to listen to others with differing views. If it were all true - OUCH! While there are nuggets of truth in amongst all these observations, I suspect things are better than presented. But there is sufficient meat to the observations that it ought to reign in intellectual hubris just a bit.