Are we, the human species, unreasonable?
The answer isn’t simple, but we may not be irrational creatures after all.
This post originally appeared onContributoria.
The question has been hanging over me because of my profession.
I work as a cognitive psychologist, researching and teaching how people think.
Or that moreattractive people are judged as more trustworthy, or they arguments they give as more intelligent.
Commentators and popularizers of this work have been quick to pick up on these findings.
But in nearly all of our life, willing decides nothing.
Our acts are end points in long sequences of unconscious responses.
They arise from a structure of habits and skills that is almost infinitely complicated.
Most of our life is enacted without conscious awareness.
The science, and those who promote it, seem to be saying that we’re unreasonable creatures.
So I set out to get to the bottom of the evidence on how we respond to rational arguments.
Does rationality lose out every time to irrational motivations?
These American social psychologists recruited participants who had views for or against the death penalty.
They then presented them with reports of studies which seemed to support or oppose the death penalty.
In 11 of the 14 states, murder rates were lower after adoption of the death penalty.
This research supports the deterrent effect of the death penalty.
But I want to persuade you that this is evidence of the power of reason, not unreason.
It is not really surprising that their views can’t be dislodged with a few choice anecdotes.
Who’d want opinions if they were shifted by the slightest counter-argument.
That’s not rationality.
Previous work had revealed that such a change was “strongly counter-attitudinal for most college students.”
That’s psychology code for “they hated the idea.”
Cacioppo and Petty varied the kinds of arguments they used on their volunteers.
A second factor was manipulated: how involved people felt in the argument.
Half the volunteers were told that this change was under consideration for the University of Missouri.
People’s minds were made up, and no argument shifted them.
But in the high involvement condition both the strong and weak arguments had a significant effect.
Weak arguments entrenched people’s positionsthey shifted their attitude to be more against the final exam.
Because of this, one person’s strong argument won’t be the same as another’s.
You are shown, flat on the table, four cards.
Which cards do you’re gonna wanna turn over to test if this rule is true?
it doesn’t say that non-vowels can’t lead to even numbers too).
When you do this, two remarkable things happen.
Furthermore the solutions can be demonstrated to be correct.
In these circumstances rational argument is productive.
Insight into how to do this comes from experiments on the so-called “Illusion of Explanatory Depth.”
The original research which framed the phenomenon asked people to self-rate their understanding of how things work.
Examples for this experiment were taken from the classic children’s bookThe Way Things Work.
They then answered test questions about their understanding.
They then rated their original understanding again.
After the trying to provide explanations, participant’s ratings of understanding dropped.
There is a lesson here for all of us about over confidence.
we make the car go faster, and the speedometer shows the new speed).
We, they argue, then mistake this sampling of the environment for our own knowledge.
Without the working system in front of us, we’re actually pretty ignorant of its internal operation.
How did this happen?
Argumentation
This raises the general topic of how we react to arguments.
Other work has shown thatthe skill of recognizing and developing arguments can be taught.
This theory connects with that of another important theorist of rationality, Jonathan Haidt.
This classic work looks at six major factors which can help persuade other people.
But a second look might give us pause.
Bloom cites an idea Peter Singer describes in his bookThe Expanding Circle.
This is that when you decide to make a moral argumenti.e.
Maybe tomorrow you slack off, so your own rule will work against you.
for persuade you struck a bargain with the group’s shared understanding of what’s reasonable.
Once you’ve done this, Singer argues, you breathe life into the internal logic of argument.
Are We Rational or Not?
So where does this leave us?
Are we a rational animal, or as Robert Heinlein said, merely a rationalizing one?
But beware Singer’s warning: logic has its own dynamic.
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