Over at Mother Jones, I have a major feature story
that just went up about the psychology of science denial--and, indeed, denial in general. In it, I unpack a theory called "motivated reasoning," which political psychologists have used to explain all manner of divides over factual, resolvable issues. Motivated reasoning is, in many ways, the updated, neuroscience infused version of "cognitive dissonance":
The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a ...
