Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

by Steven Pinker

When individuals are given the Wason selection task, for example, only one in ten picks the right cards, but when they are put in groups, around seven in ten get it right. All it takes is for one member to see the correct answer, and almost always that person persuades the others.

In study after study, liberals and conservatives accept or reject the same scientific conclusion depending on whether or not it supports their talking points, and they endorse or oppose the same policy depending on whether it was proposed by a Democratic or a Republican politician.

people reason their way into or out of a conclusion even when it offers them no personal advantage. It’s enough that the conclusion enhances the correctness or nobility of their political, religious, ethnic, or cultural tribe. It’s called, obviously enough, the myside bias,

Kahan and collaborators showed a video of a protest in front of a building.29 When the title labeled it a protest against abortion at a health clinic, conservatives saw a peaceful demonstration, while liberals saw the protesters block the entrance and intimidate the enterers. When it was labeled a protest against the exclusion of gay people at a military recruiting center, it was the conservatives who saw pitchforks and torches and the liberals who saw Mahatma Gandhi.

Kahan has found that most believers and deniers are equally clueless about the scientific facts (many believers in climate change, for example, think that it has something to do with toxic waste dumps and the ozone hole). What predicts their belief is their politics: the farther to the right, the more denial.

We are not, he suggests, living in a “post-truth” society. The problem is that we are living in a myside society.

We’ve long known that humans are keen to divide themselves into competitive teams, but it’s not clear why it’s now the left–right split that is pulling each side’s rationality in different directions rather than the customary fault lines of religion, race, and class.

The rise of political sectarianism in the United States is commonly blamed (like everything else) on social media, but its roots lie deeper. They include the fractionation and polarization of broadcast media, with partisan talk radio and cable news displacing national networks; gerrymandering and other geographic distortions of political representation, which incentivize politicians to cater to cliques rather than coalitions;

the decline of class-crossing civil-society organizations like churches, service clubs, and volunteer groups.

Stanovich notes that the problem in justifying motivated reasoning with Bayesian priors is that the prior often reflects what the reasoner wants to be true rather than what he or she has grounds for believing is true.

There is a different and more perverse rationality to the myside bias, coming not from Bayes’s rule but from game theory. Kahan calls it expressive rationality: reasoning that is driven by the goal of being valued by one’s peer group rather than attaining the most accurate understanding of the world. People express opinions that advertise where their heart lies.

flaunting those loyalty badges is anything but irrational. Voicing a local heresy, such as rejecting gun control in a Democratic social circle or advocating it in a Republican one, can mark you as a traitor, a quisling, so...

Unfortunately, what’s rational for each of us seeking acceptance in a clique is not so rational for all of us in a democracy seeking the best understanding of the world.

As the novelist Philip K. Dick wrote, reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Mercier notes that holders of weird beliefs often don’t have the courage of their convictions.

People divide their worlds into two zones. One consists of the physical objects around them, the other people they deal with face to face,

The other zone is the world beyond immediate experience: the distant past, the unknowable future, faraway peoples and places, remote corridors of power, the microscopic, the cosmic,

People may entertain notions about what happens in these zones, but they have no way of finding out, and anyway it makes no discernible difference to their lives. Beliefs in these zones are narratives, which may be entertaining or inspiring or morally edifying.

The function of these beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpo...

we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.43 At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset.

we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

More than two billion people believe that if one doesn’t accept Jesus as one’s savior one will be damned to eternal torment in hell. Fortunately, they don’t take the next logical step and try to convert people to Christianity at swordpoint for their own good, or torture heretics who might lure others into damnation.

For that matter, though many people profess to believe in an afterlife, they seem to be in no hurry to leave this vale of tears for eternal bliss in paradise. Thankfully, Western religious belief is safely parked in the mythology zone,

Another zone of mainstream unreality is the national myth. Most countries enshrine a founding narrative as part of their collective consciousness.

Guardians of the mythical heritage don’t feel a need to get to the bottom of what actually transpired, and may resent the historians who place it in the reality zone and unearth its shallow history, constructed identity, reciprocal provocations with the neighbors, and founding fathers’ feet of clay.

Pseudoscience, paranormal woo-woo, and medical quackery engage some of our deepest cognitive intuitions.47 We are intuitive dualists, sensing that minds can exist apart from bodies.

And so we have telepathy, clairvoyance, souls, ghosts, reincarnation, and messages from the great beyond.

But the mindset also makes people believe in homeopathy, herbal remedies, purging and bloodletting, and a rejection of foreign adulterants such as vaccines and genetically modified foods.

And we are intuitive teleologists.50 Just as our own plans and artifacts are designed with a purpose, so, we are apt to think, is the complexity of the living and nonliving world. Thus we are receptive to creationism, astrology, synchronicity, and the mystical belief that everything happens for a reason. A scientific education is supposed to stifle these primitive intuitions, but for several reasons its reach is limited.

educated people trust the university-based scientific establishment: its consensus is good enough for them.51 Unfortunately, for many people the boundary between the scientific establishment and the pseudoscientific fringe is obscure.

Foundational principles, such as that the universe has no goals related to human concerns, that all physical interactions are governed by a few fundamental forces, that living bodies are intricate molecular machines, and that the mind is the information-processing activity of the brain, are never articulated, perhaps because they would seem to insult religious and moral sensibilities.

To understand viral humbug such as urban legends, tabloid headlines, and fake news, we have to remember that it is fantastically entertaining.

A recent quantitative analysis of the content of fake news concluded that “the same features that make urban legends, fiction, and in fact any narrative, culturally attractive also operate for online misinformation.”

QAnon falls into still another genre of entertainment, the multiplatform alternate-reality game.54 Adherents parse cryptic clues periodically dropped by Q (the hypothetical government whistleblower), crowdsource their hypotheses, and gain internet fame by sharing their discoveries.

fake news may go viral when its spreaders think a higher value is at stake, like reinforcing solidarity within their own side and reminding comrades about the perfidiousness of the other one. Sometimes the moral is not even a coherent political strategy but a sense of moral superiority: the impression that rival social classes, and powerful institutions from which the sharers feel alienated, are decadent and corrupt.

Conspiracy theories, for their part, flourish because humans have always been vulnerable to real conspiracies.55 Foraging people can’t be too careful. The deadliest form of warfare among tribal peoples is not the pitched battle but the stealthy ambush and the predawn raid.

In signal detection terms, the cost of missing a real conspiracy is higher than that of false-alarming to a suspected one. This calls for setting our bias toward the trigger-happy rather than the gun-shy end of the scale, adapting us to try to get wind of possible conspiracies even on tenuous evidence.

Studies of rumors show that they tend to convey threats and dangers, and that they confer an aura of expertise on the spreader. And perhaps surprisingly, when they circulate among people with a vested interest in their content, such as within workplaces, they are usually correct.

In everyday life, then, there are incentives for being a sentinel who warns people of hidden threats, or a relay who disseminates their warnings. The problem is that social and mass media allow rumors to spread through networks of people who have no stake in their truth. They consume the rumors for entertainment and affirmation rather than self-protection,

For the same reasons, originators and spreaders suffer no reputational damage for being wrong. Without these veracity checks, social media rumors, unlike workplace rumors, are incorrect more often than correct.

Just as organisms evolve adaptations that protect them from being eaten, ideas may evolve adaptations that protect them from being refuted.

False beliefs about vaccines, public health measures, and climate change threaten the well-being of billions. Conspiracy theories incite terrorism, pogroms, wars, and genocide. A corrosion of standards of truth undermines democracy and clears the ground for tyranny.

We should not lose sight of how much rationality is out there. Few people in developed countries today believe in werewolves, animal sacrifice, bloodletting, miasmas, the divine right of leaders, or omens in eclipses and comets, though all were mainstream in centuries past.

Openness to Evidence.64 This is Russell’s credo that beliefs should be based on good grounds. It is a rejection of motivated reasoning; a commitment to placing all beliefs within the reality zone; an endorsement of the statement attributed to John Maynard Keynes, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

People should always take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs. (agree) Certain beliefs are just too important to abandon no matter how good a case can be made against them. (disagree) Beliefs should always be revised in response to new information or evidence. (agree) No one can talk me out of something I know is right. (disagree) I believe that loyalty to one’s ideals and principles is more important than “open-mindedness.” (disagree)

Openness to Evidence correlates with cognitive reflection (the ability to think twice and not fall for trick questions,

It would be nice to see people earn brownie points for acknowledging uncertainty in their beliefs, questioning the dogmas of their political sect, and changing their minds when the facts change, rather than for being steadfast warriors for the dogmas of their clique.

Legislatures are largely populated by lawyers, whose professional goal is victory rather than truth.

Among politicians, both of the major American parties indulge in industrial-strength myside bias, but the blame is not symmetrical. Even before the Trumpian takeover, thoughtful Republican stalwarts had disparaged their own organization as “the party of stupid” for its anti-intellectualism and hostility to science.73 Since then, many others have been horrified by their party’s acquiescence to Trump’s maniacal lying and trolling:

Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press.77 That trust is a precious resource which should not be squandered.