YANSS 171 – How partisan identities affect our ability to reason, rationalize, and recall
Jay Van Bavel studies “from neurons to social networks…how collective concerns — group identities, moral values, and political beliefs — shape the mind and brain,” and in this episode we travel to his office at NYU to sit down and ask him a zillion questions about how the brain uses motivated reasoning to create the separate realities we argue over on a daily basis.
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Patreon – Soundcloud
View this post on InstagramA post shared by David McRaney (@davidmcraney) on Jan 21, 2020 at 8:06pm PST
Jay Van Bavel is an Associate Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University and director of the Social Perception and Evaluation Lab.
From his paper The Partisan Brain: An Identity-Based Model of Political Belief: “Democracies assume accurate knowledge by the populace, but the human attraction to fake and untrustworthy news poses a serious problem for healthy democratic functioning. …Identification with political parties – known as partisanship – can bias information processing in the human brain. There is extensive evidence that people engage in motivated political reasoning, but recent research suggests that partisanship can alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgments.”
In the episode, you will learn all about his work studying the affects of social identity and morality on politics and human cognition, and how modern media companies capitalize on and influence group identity and morality.
Links and Sources
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Patreon – Soundcloud
Social Identity and Morality Lab
The Partisan Brain: An Identity-Based Model of Political Belief
David McRaney's Blog
- David McRaney's profile
- 582 followers
