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Where is Rand's evidence for this view? Again, we have nothing -- merely her own say-so.

This, of course, is an argument ad hominem with no scientific standing whatsoever.

According to Sayegh, the conventional way of thinking about decision making is to banish emotion from its decisions entirely.

Rand, alas, never provided any evidence for this assertion. Her chief disciple, Leonard Peikoff, did provide the following:

first, it's merely an anecdote and as such cannot be regarded as decisive on this issue; but even more critically, the anecdote doesn't establish what it claims.

Since consciousness is only "the tip of the iceberg," it would appear unlikely that Rand could have introspected her way to the discovery that clashes between "reason" and "emotion" are caused by "stale" thinking which the mind was forbidden to revise.

Rand herself must have had an experience involving stale thinking leading to reason-emotion clashes. At some point, Rand must have introspected herself involved in a bout of "stale thinking" (whatever that might be); she must have further introspected her mind engaged in the process of forbidding any revision of this "stale" cogitation; and, finally, she must have introspected the resulting clash between "reason" and emotion.

Since, on the assumptions of our thought experiment, Rand's knowledge is based solely on her own private experiences as perceived via introspection, we cannot be sure that her claim applies to other people.

"The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty determines a man’s choice of values, which determine his emotions and his character. It is in this sense that man is a being of self-made soul."

To describe this viewpoint as controversial greatly understates its tremendous reach. Were it true, it would mean that nearly every scientist in the biological and behavorial sciences, nearly every great poet, dramatist, and novelist, and all great statemen, generals, businessmen, etc. have been wrong; for nearly everyone who has ever studied, described, bargained with, dealt with, or commanded human beings has assumed that man is not a being of self-made soul, that his "soul" (or character) is a product of many factors, and that something called "human nature" most definitely exists and can be used to make generalizations concerning how human beings are likely to react to various incentives.

Rand's assertion that man is a being of self-made soul goes into the very teeth of this evidence.

It's called "motivated reasoning"—and was described at length in Mother Jones (by me) back in 2011. Here's the gist: People's emotional investments in their ideas, identities and world views bias their initial reading of evidence, and do so on a level prior to conscious thought. Then, the mind organizes arguments in favor of one's beliefs—or, against attacks on one's beliefs—based on the same emotional connections. And so you proceed to argue your case—but really you're rationalizing, not reasoning objectively.

Conspiracy theorizing. Psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, who studies conspiracy theorists. So what's the relationship between the two?

motivated reasoning and conspiracy mongering are at least in part separable, and worth keeping apart in your mind. To show as much, let's use the issue global warming as an example.

Suddenly the researcher noticed that according to the equipment hooked up to the monkey’s brain, neurons were firing that were associated with grasping motions, even though the animal had only SEEN something being grasped. This was odd, because normally brain cells are very specialized and nobody knew of any neurons that would activate both when performing an action or when seeing someone else perform the same action. Yet here the monkey was, blithely firing neurons previously only associated with performing motor actions while just sitting still and watching.

Thus was the first observation of a mirror neuron in action, a brain cell set apart from many of its peers and which are also present in delicious human brains. It turns out that many researchers like the aforementioned Dr. Marco Iacoboni, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UCLA, believe that mirror neurons are important for our ability to empathize with things we see, like the plight of poor Lee and Clementine in The Walking Dead.

I think this is one of the reasons why The Walking Dead is so good at eliciting emotions: it frequently shows us the faces of the characters and lets us see all the work put into creating easily recognizable and convincing facial expressions. And so it’s not the zombies that elicit dread in us. Instead it’s things like the face that Kenny makes when Lee tells him to make a hard decision about his family.

You the reader can perceive every potentiality I have been discussing simply by observing your own consciousness. The extent of your knowledge or intelligence is not relevant here, because the issue is whether you use whatever knowledge and intelligence you do possess.

Does introspection really yield self-evident facts? No, of course not. Nor is it an assumption that any Objectivist, from Rand down, would ever consistently adhere to.

Exhibit 1:I was astonished at how closed she typically was to any new knowledge [testifies Nathaniel Branden] .…When I tried to tell her of some new research that suggested that certain kinds of depression have a biological basis, she answered angrily, ‘I can tell you what causes depression; I can tell you about rational depression and I can tell you about irrational depression—the second is mostly self-pity—and in neither case does biology enter into it.’ I asked her how she could make a scientific statement with such certainty, since she had never studied the field; she shrugged bitterly and snapped, ‘Because I know how to think.’” (Judgement Day, 1989, 347)

So how exactly does evolutionary psychology explain the misery, the jealousy, the lying [that occurred as a result of Rand’s affair with Nathaniel Branden]? When Rand and her followers tried to wish away obvious facts about humans' emotional constitution, their feelings didn't change. But they made each other miserable pretending that they felt the way they were supposed to feel. Rand and Nathaniel had to pretend that Nathaniel was attracted to Rand. Their spouses had to pretend that they weren't jealous. Rand and Nathaniel had to pretend that they believed that their spouses weren't jealous. The more they tried to talk themselves into having feelings contrary to human nature, the worse they felt. Nathaniel coped not by admitting error, but by finding a mistress and lying to cover it up. Since Rand had already ruled out the obvious explanation for Nathaniel's behavior, she went on a wild goose chase to find the "real" explanation. Etc...

In 1974, psychologists Art Aron and Donald Dutton hired a woman to stand in the middle of this suspension bridge. As men passed her on their way across, she asked them if they would be willing to fill out a questionnaire. At the end of the questions, she asked them to examine an illustration of a lady covering her face and then make up a back story to explain it.

they had their assistant go through the same routine on a wide, sturdy, wooden bridge standing fixed just a few feet off of the ground.

Think of the Big Issues in your favorite series. Whether it is realistic science explaining humanoid life throughout the galaxy, or dealing with FTL travel, or the ethical ambiguity of progress, or even the very purpose of the human race in our universe, Mass Effect has got it. By virtue of three simple traits – its medium, its message, and its philosophy – Mass Effect eclipses and engulfs all of science fiction's greatest universes. Let me show you how.

As a vessel for an epic science fiction narrative, the medium of action-adventure game affords three immediate advantages – setting, casting, and emotional involvement.

Political advertisements (even the rare ones that actually refer to facts) are full of fallacies.  The appeal to emotion is clear.  The “good guy” is shown shaking hands with a diverse group of people.  He/she is fighting for justice, fairness, freedom, etc (all words that evoke positive emotion and passion.)  The “bad guy” in the ad is always shown in black-and-white or grainy film with ominous music playing in the background.  Fear tactics are clear as the opponent is charged with wanting to take away freedom, raise taxes, go to war, take away healthcare, destroy the economy, ruin the environment, free terrorists, etc.  If your emotions aren’t fully charged after a 30 second ad, you might want to check your pulse.

In short, alleviating disappointment means understanding what someone actually means when they say they’re disappointed. And for a politician, it means realizing that a certain amount of disillusionment is built into the system--the natural human optimism that allows people, election after election, to believe campaign promises also consigns them to repeated bouts of disappointment. Even if a voter manages to keep his expectations low in the fever of a campaign, research suggests that his conception of the counterfactual--what might have been if different decisions had been made, different policies pursued, or different politicians elected--grows increasingly positive in his memory, setting him up for disappointment.

Of the two sister emotions, regret is by far the more studied. Regret--or, more accurately, our desire to avoid future regret--is a major factor in how we decide what to do, what to say, and what to buy. A man might go on an adventurous vacation because he doesn’t want to regret missing the opportunity, or he might forgo ordering a fifth and then a sixth cocktail because he regretted it the last time he did it. Disappointment, on the other hand, usually drives us to do not much at all, making it a less fruitful emotion for marketers and professional motivators. Negative emotions like anger or fear give people energy and incentive to act; disappointment does the opposite. That difference is reflected in polling right now that shows a yawning enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats, with the former angry, motivated, and eager to vote, and the latter listless and expected to stay home in the upcoming mid-term elections.

Gilovich sees several reasons for this, but one of them is that over time we steadily minimize the barriers to action that shape our decisions. Our instinct is to come to believe that the thing we didn’t do would have been less difficult than we found it at the time. ”We think it’s easy in retrospect to have learned a foreign language. Sure, we think, we could have found a half an hour a day to listen to tapes. But half an hour a day in actual life is hard to find,” says Gilovich.

In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [3]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [4] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.

But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum.

In the first place, it is logically fallacious to reason from two is premises to an ought conclusion, something Rand appears not to have understood. Secondly, it is psychologically impossible to derive the an end from reason. Reason is a method, a means for attaining an end. But an end must be wished for it's own sake, because it satisfies some sentiment or desire.

If reasoning played a central role in moral judgments, we would expect better reasoners to arrive at different conclusions from inferior reasoners. But this is not what the research finds. Smarter, more educated people don't reach different conclusions, they just provide more reasons to support their side of the issue. When people reason about issues of morality, they are blinded by confirmation bias.

Different people have different natural modes for their speech, and not many people can pull it off just the way Clinton does. But Clinton reminds us of the value (and rarity) of this tone in politics -- and the next time you listen to a sports-talk channel, think how much better our political discussion would be if participants assumed as much sophistication about argument as ESPN and radio-talk hosts do. 

If she had a clear, rational case against Libertarianism, wouldn’t she have presented such a case and left it at that? But she does no such thing. Instead, her arguments appear drenched in malice and petty resentment.

Now if Libertarianism really is as bad as Rand would have us believe, why did Rand have to resort to name calling and illogical guilt-by-association arguments? I have several conjectures on this score, as listed below.

Parents wanted higher self-esteem for their kids and closer relationships with them. Fear-based, power-coercive relationships went the way of the rod in classrooms. So it's no wonder that today's teens feel much more free to act out than their predecessors ever hoped. And they do. Just ask any parent of a teenager, who will likely complain about rudeness, ill manners, constant criticism and even being yelled at by their teenager.

"She's really a beautiful person," says Cregon. "I see her with small children at camp and her little cousins and stuff, and she's fabulous. And she's really sweet with her uncle, her aunt, my mom. It's just me!"

The same thing can happen when we listen to the thoughts, opinions, or beliefs of someone we trust.  Trust can shift your brain from critical thinking into auto-pilot.

We also shift into mental auto-pilot when we are highly emotional or filled with fear. It is for that reason that people who wish to deceive you will use inflammatory language to stir up those emotions and disturb your critical thinking ability.