The Illusion of Public Reason

Morality is something we feel more so than think. This emerging view that judgments about right and wrong are grounded in and organized by affect and intuition has important implications for understanding political beliefs and behavior. In this talk, I present evidence that the differing moral intuitions of liberals and conservatives shape their reasoning in ways that lead each side to see their own political views as principled, logical, and effective and the other side’s views as hypocritical, illogical, and counterproductive. This tendency is found on both sides of the political aisle and helps account for the “alternative facts” endorsed by Red and Blue America. Motivated reasoning cloaks moral conflict in a veneer of public reason (Rawls, 1971) such that politicians and pundits make data-based arguments for preferred policy positions that are little more than moral justifications wrapped in factual clothing. I conclude that this fundamental tendency for people to confuse what they value with what they believe to be true is a key contributor to the corrosive political polarization that plagues contemporary American politics

Bringing context back: How the environment shapes motivated reasoning

The Knowledge Illusion

Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? The answer is that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individually oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things; true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the world around us. The talk will highlight research aimed at improving public discourse around divisive issues in light of individual ignorance and distributed knowledge.

The Problem of Political Misperceptions

Journalists and fact-checkers devote extensive resources to combating political misperceptions yet significant percentages of the public remain misinformed about politics. Understanding why people hold misperceptions is critical if we hope to limit their political influence. In this talk I highlight several key factors that contribute to false beliefs about politics. First, I demonstrate that partisan media facilitate inaccurate political beliefs but that this effect is not due to partisan echo chambers. Instead, I suggest partisan media outlets might increase misperceptions by offering news consumers cues regarding the legitimacy of the evidence surrounding these claims. Second, I illustrate how both distinct emotions and political intuition, not simply partisan bias, facilitate acceptance of political falsehoods.

Does Choice Lie in the Eyes of the Beholder? Implications of a Choice Mindset for Cognition, Emotion, Motivation, and Policy

Extensive research in psychology has shown that providing people with objective choices in a task can increase their motivation on the task. I propose that even in the same objective circumstances, people can perceive themselves and others as either merely engaging in a series of actions (a neutral action mindset) or making a series of choices (a choice mindset). Going beyond the benefits of actual choices for task-specific motivation, my research shows that activating the choice mindset can have a broad range of downstream consequences in diverse unrelated domains. When judging others, people in a choice mindset put responsibility on the individual rather than on contextual factors, thus becoming more susceptible to the fundamental attribution error and being more likely to blame the victim. People in a choice mindset put responsibility for societal problems, such as wealth inequality, primarily on individuals (e.g., “rich people make good choices, poor people made bad choices”) rather than on the context (e.g., such as regressive tax systems). People in a choice mindset think more analytically rather than holistically, focusing on the parts of a phenomenon rather than the whole. The choice mindset helps people cope with distressing events, helping them positively reappraise the situation through the lens of choice and thus experience lower negative emotions. A field experiment found that a chronic choice mindset can improve people’s everyday decision making: students’ time allocation decisions suffered as they approached the end of the semester, but a five week choice mindset intervention arrested this decline, helping students allocate their time in a more optimal manner.

Conceptual and Epistemic Obstacles to Understanding Science

Three decades of research in cognitive development and science education has revealed that students enter the science classroom with rich, though inaccurate, theories of everyday phenomena that interfere with learning. I will present research suggesting that these “intuitive theories” are never truly replaced by scientific theories but rather coexist with them, shaping the kinds of inferences we make, the kinds of explanations we endorse, and the kinds of information we accept as true. While adults with extensive science education are typically able to discriminate between scientific and non-scientific claims, they are slower to make those discriminations for claims that are inconsistent with their intuitive theories, and they justify the endorsement of scientific claims by appealing to intuition and authority rather than theory and evidence. Our understanding of science may thus be constrained by patterns of reasoning that emerge in childhood but persist long thereafter.

Science comprehension without curiosity is no virtue, and curiosity without comprehension no vice:

It has been assumed (very reasonably) for many years that the quality of enlightened self-government demands a science-literate citizenry. Recent research, however, has shown that all manner of reasoning proficiency—from cognitive reflection to numeracy to actively open-minded thinking—magnifies politically motivated reasoning and hence political polarization on policy-relevant science. The one science-comprehension-related disposition that defies this pattern is science curiosity, which has been shown to make citizens more amenable to engaging with evidence that challenges their political predispositions. The presentation will review the relevant research and offer conjectures on their significance, both theoretical and practical.

Information Processing in the 21st Century Media Environment: Is Humanity up to the Task: There are a variety of processes whereby individuals can reach biased conclusions about social, political, and scientific matters.This talk proposes that features of 21st Century society and the nature of our contemporary information environment exacerbate group differences in beliefs, attitudes, and summary judgments. I present data to catalog the scope of contemporary perceptual disagreements and to identify some of the ways that media-related and social factors that can deepen existing cleavages. Approaches to mitigating group differences in this environment are then explored.

The Geography of Post-Truth World: An Introduction and Illustration: News reports suggest we live in a post-truth world in which expertise, fact, and reality are either discounted or dismissed. However, some of the issues that such a “post truth” world highlights are enduring classics of constant concern in the behavioral sciences. In this talk, I discuss specific implications of modern post-truth phenomena for science, education, and political life, describing how each talk in the series relates to them. I then illustrate post-truth issues by describing ongoing work in the lab asking who among political partisans is most likely to believe outlandish assertions about the other side–and whether these beliefs are authentic or mere posturing.

The truth is under attack from the US government and from hordes of internet trolls. The situation is unprecedented. But it is lies we have to confront, not attacks on the very concepts of “truth” and “fact.” For that we have to look at Western Universities over the last several decades.