Are the so-called Intellectuals Falling into the Politically Motivated Reasoning Trap?

In his seminal book *Thinking, Fast and Slow*, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman wrote:

Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. Our article *[with Amos Tversky]* challenged both assumptions without discussing them directly. We documented systematic errors on the thinking of normal people, and we traced these errors to the design of the machinery of cognition rather than to the corruption of thought by emotion.

As their work progressed, Kahneman and Tversky uncovered several biases in our intuition, including what they called *confirmation bias*, the human tendency to seek evidence that confirms what we already believe, and prompts us to avoid the pursuit of disconfirming evidence. This bias is manifest today in the extreme polarization in our society. The internet and with it, the development of analytics that enable the media to determine who is tuned into a particular radio or television station, have prompted the media to identify their demographic and tailor their news to confirm the biases or orientations of their viewers. There is no longer a “most trusted name in news,” among the various television stations, because they are all catering to confirmation bias for their specific demographic.

Why do otherwise intelligent people subscribe so easily to certain ideologies that could be discounted with a little intelligent investigation? Rather than investigate the validity of certain claims, many intelligent people use their abilities to create elaborate arguments to support unsupportable beliefs–what Dan Kahan of Yale University is calling *politically motivated reasoning*. We noted above that confirmation bias prompts us to explore only those resources or media that support our opinions. However, Kahan proposes a more insidious kind of bias whereby people consider evidence contrary to their opinion, but discount its authenticity when considering how much validity to attribute to its content. He states:

High numeracy—a quantitative reasoning proficiency that strongly predicts the disposition to use System 2 information processing [i.e., rational thinking]—also magnifies politically motivated reasoning. In one study, subjects highest in Numeracy more accurately construed complex empirical data on the effectiveness of gun control laws but only when the data, properly interpreted, supported the position congruent with their political outlooks. When the data properly interpreted was inconsistent with their predispositions, they were more disposed than low numeracy subjects to dismiss it as flawed. If this is how people use their reasoning proficiencies to assess evidence about contested facts in the real world, then we would expect to see exactly what observational studies consistently find: namely, a progressive increase in political polarization as individuals of opposing outlooks become even more proficient in critical reasoning.

In other words, politically motivated reasoning causes us to weigh more heavily the evidence that agrees with our current opinions and attribute less weight to evidence that challenges our beliefs. Furthermore, those who are most proficient in system 2 thinking [rational thinking] tend to use their higher order cognitive skills to craft better arguments to support their current opinions rather than to challenge them. 

While it is unfortunate that politically motivated reasoning is widespread in the lay public, it is both tragic and dangerous that this cognitive distortion has been contaminating some of the research in the social sciences, forcing the APA (American Psychological Society) to assert in their report *Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns:* 

[An] unfortunate aspect of the *[nature-nurture]* debate was that many participants made little effort to distinguish scientific issues from political ones. Research findings were often assessed not so much on their merits or their scientific standing as on their supposed political implications. In such a climate, individuals who wish to make their own judgments find it hard to know what to believe. 

As we struggle to separate “truth” from fiction, we must have honest research that is free of political ideology, because we can no longer trust the media to present an unbiased view of world events. In the clip below, we see a question that is posed by someone looking for a “comeback” to support a political position, rather than investigate whether the assertion is true. Aaron Brown in his response shows a well-balanced response in first checking the validity of the assertion rather than dismissing it.