On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 11:41 AM, glen <g...@ropella.name> wrote: > [ ... ] > Now, that carries us to how/whether/why humans would use irrational > inference procedures. But I think we would _need_ some evidence that > people actually use irrational reasoning procedures. I think even > so-called "irrational" things like _emotions_ are, somewhere deep down, > rational. Those emotions are an evolutionarily selected decision-making > ability that has its own calculus. > > Bob Altemeyer's research on right-wing authoritarian (RWA) personalities -- pdf at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ -- finds that high scoring RWAs suffer from severe cognitive disabilities which essentially render them immune to reason. (Note that "right-wing" here is a technical term meaning "adherent of the status quo".)
But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and--to top it all off--a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. There's an article in today's Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/business/media/banished-for-questioning-the-gospel-of-guns.html, which unintentionally makes the case that the gun rights lobby is essentially a coalition of right-wing authoritarians and gun manufacturers. They cannot tolerate any discussion of the dogma because they are incapable of reasoning on the subject, only able to distinguish the party line from apostasy so they can attack the enemies. Just because there is a reason to be a lynch mob doesn't make a lynch mob reasonable. I think you're confounding the rationality of explanation with the rationality of the explained. -- rec --
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