reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.
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Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds | The New Yorker - 0 views
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Once formed,” the researchers observed dryly, “impressions are remarkably perseverant.”
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Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,”
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Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
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If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias.
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The fact that both we and it survive, Mercier and Sperber argue, proves that it must have some adaptive function, and that function, they maintain, is related to our “hypersociability.”
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Humans, they point out, aren’t randomly credulous. Presented with someone else’s argument, we’re quite adept at spotting the weaknesses. Almost invariably, the positions we’re blind about are our own.
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reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group.
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“This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.
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People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people.
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“One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group.
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If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless.
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We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together,
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If we—or our friends or the pundits on CNN—spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we’d realize how clueless we are and moderate our views.
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In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bia
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the system
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They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs.
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emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science
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Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the