21One might see our human capacity to give counterfeit reasons in order to deceive others as a perversion of our basically solid ability to reason privately, i.e., to decide what to believe by collecting reasons for and against such beliefs. But in fact, it has been plausibly argued that our uniquely human tendency to collect reasons is primarily designed for social effect. That is, humans developed an ability to collect reasons mainly for the purpose of persuading others to support predetermined conclusions. This can help explain common human tendencies toward overconfidence, confirmation
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