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.
If reason is designed to generate sound judgments, then it’s hard to conceive of a more serious design flaw than confirmation bias.
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.”
Here the counter-argument couched in evolutionary psych about its adaptive function - hypersociability.
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.
reflects the task that reason evolved to perform, which is to prevent us from getting screwed by the other members of our group.
“This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up.
Environment changed too quickly for our evolutionary progress to keep up.
People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people.
“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.
When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.
it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain
If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless.
We’ve been relying on one another’s expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together,
This is the opposite side to doubting our group members, once we trust them, we can be somewhat blind in our trust.
This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous,
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.
In a well-run laboratory, there’s no room for myside bia
This is where the second section begins, arguing that our evolutionary emphasis on social collaboration also operates to short-circuit or undermine the effectiveness of reason as a WOK.