FOUR
Vote for Me (Here’s Why)
Suppose the gods were to flip a coin on the day of your birth. Heads,
you will be a supremely honest and fair person throughout your life,
yet everyone around you will believe you’re a scoundrel. Tails, you
will cheat and lie whenever it suits your needs, yet everyone around
you will believe you’re a paragon of virtue. Which outcome would
you prefer? Plato’s Republic—one of the most influential works in the
Western canon—is an extended argument that you should pick heads,
for your own good. It is better to be than to seem virtuous.
Early in The Republic, Glaucon (Plato’s brother) challenges Socrates
to prove that justice itself—and not merely the reputation for justice
—leads to happiness. Glaucon asks Socrates to imagine what would
happen to a man who had the mythical ring of Gyges, a gold ring that
makes its wearer invisible at will:
Now, no one, it seems, would be so incorruptible that he
would stay on the path of justice or stay away from other
people’s property, when he could take whatever he
wanted from the marketplace with impunity, go into
people’s houses and have sex with anyone he wished, kill
or release from prison anyone he wished, and do all the
other things that would make him like a god among
humans. Rather his actions would be in no way different
from those of an unjust person, and both would follow the
same path.1
Glaucon’s thought experiment implies that people are only virtuous
because they fear the consequences of getting caught—especially the
damage to their reputations. Glaucon says he will not be satisfied
until Socrates can prove that a just man with a bad reputation is
happier than an unjust man who is widely thought to be good.2
It’s quite a challenge, and Socrates approaches it with an analogy:
Justice in a man is like justice in a city (a polis, or city-state). He then
argues that a just city is one in which there is harmony, cooperation,
and a division of labor between all the castes.3 Farmers farm,
carpenters build, and rulers rule. All contribute to the common good,
and all lament when misfortune happens to any of them.
But in an unjust city, one group’s gain is another’s loss, faction
schemes against faction, the powerful exploit the weak, and the city is
divided against itself. To make sure the polis doesn’t descend into the
chaos of ruthless self-interest, Socrates says that philosophers must
rule, for only they will pursue what is truly good, not just what is
good for themselves.4
Having gotten his listeners to agree to this picture of a just,
harmonious, and happy city, Socrates then argues that exactly these
sorts of relationships apply within a just, harmonious, and happy
person. If philosophers must rule the happy city, then reason must
rule the happy person. And if reason rules, then it cares about what is
truly good, not just about the appearance of virtue.
Plato (who had been a student of Socrates) had a coherent set of
beliefs about human nature, and at the core of these beliefs was his
faith in the perfectibility of reason. Reason is our original nature, he
thought; it was given to us by the gods and installed in our spherical
heads. Passions often corrupt reason, but if we can learn to control
those passions, our God-given rationality will shine forth and guide us
to do the right thing, not the popular thing.
As is often the case in moral philosophy, arguments about what we
ought to do depend upon assumptions—often unstated—about human
nature and human psychology.5 And for Plato, the assumed
psychology is just plain wrong. In this chapter I’ll show that reason is
not fit to rule; it was designed to seek justification, not truth. I’ll show
that Glaucon was right: people care a great deal more about
appearance and reputation than about reality. In fact, I’ll praise
Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right—the guy
who realized that the most important principle for designing an
ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all
the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.
William James, one of the founders of American psychology, urged
psychologists to take a “functionalist” approach to the mind. That
means examining things in terms of what they do, within a larger
system. The function of the heart is to pump blood within the
circulatory system, and you can’t understand the heart unless you
keep that in mind. James applied the same logic to psychology: if you
want to understand any mental mechanism or process, you have to
know its function within some larger system. Thinking is for doing, he
said.6
What, then, is the function of moral reasoning? Does it seem to
have been shaped, tuned, and crafted (by natural selection) to help us
find the truth, so that we can know the right way to behave and
condemn those who behave wrongly? If you believe that, then you
are a rationalist, like Plato, Socrates, and Kohlberg.7 Or does moral
reasoning seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us
pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and
convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes? If
you believe that, then you are a Glauconian.
WE ARE ALL INTUITIVE POLITICIANS
If you see one hundred insects working together toward a common
goal, it’s a sure bet they’re siblings. But when you see one hundred
people working on a construction site or marching off to war, you’d
be astonished if they all turned out to be members of one large
family. Human beings are the world champions of cooperation
beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of
formal and informal accountability. We’re really good at holding
others accountable for their actions, and we’re really skilled at
navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for
our own.
Phil Tetlock, a leading researcher in the study of accountability,
defines accountability as the “explicit expectation that one will be
called upon to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, or actions to others,”
coupled with an expectation that people will reward or punish us
based on how well we justify ourselves.8 When nobody is answerable
to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished, everything
falls apart. (How zealously people punish slackers and cheaters will
emerge in later chapters as an important difference between liberals
and conservatives.)
Tetlock suggests a useful metaphor for understanding how people
behave within the webs of accountability that constitute human
societies: we act like intuitive politicians striving to maintain appealing
moral identities in front of our multiple constituencies. Rationalists
such as Kohlberg and Turiel portrayed children as little scientists who
use logic and experimentation to figure out the truth for themselves.
When we look at children’s efforts to understand the physical world,
the scientist metaphor is apt; kids really are formulating and testing
hypotheses, and they really do converge, gradually, on the truth.9 But
in the social world, things are different, according to Tetlock. The
social world is Glauconian.10 Appearance is usually far more
important than reality.
In Tetlock’s research, subjects are asked to solve problems and
make decisions.11 For example, they’re given information about a
legal case and then asked to infer guilt or innocence. Some subjects
are told that they’ll have to explain their decisions to someone else.
Other subjects know that they won’t be held accountable by anyone.
Tetlock found that when left to their own devices, people show the
usual catalogue of errors, laziness, and reliance on gut feelings that
has been documented in so much decision-making research.12 But
when people know in advance that they’ll have to explain themselves,
they think more systematically and self-critically. They are less likely
to jump to premature conclusions and more likely to revise their
beliefs in response to evidence.
That might be good news for rationalists—maybe we can think
carefully whenever we believe it matters? Not quite. Tetlock found
two very different kinds of careful reasoning. Exploratory thought is an
“evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view.”
Confirmatory thought is “a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular
point of view.”13 Accountability increases exploratory thought only
when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before
forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (2)
the audience’s views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience
is well informed and interested in accuracy.
When all three conditions apply, people do their darnedest to figure
out the truth, because that’s what the audience wants to hear. But the
rest of the time—which is almost all of the time—accountability
pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying
harder to look right than to be right. Tetlock summarizes it like this:
A central function of thought is making sure that one acts
in ways that can be persuasively justified or excused to others.
Indeed, the process of considering the justifiability of one’s
choices may be so prevalent that decision makers not only
search for convincing reasons to make a choice when they
must explain that choice to others, they search for reasons
to convince themselves that they have made the “right”
choice.14
Tetlock concludes that conscious reasoning is carried out largely for
the purpose of persuasion, rather than discovery. But Tetlock adds
that we are also trying to persuade ourselves. We want to believe the
things we are about to say to others. In the rest of this chapter I’ll
review five bodies of experimental research supporting Tetlock and
Glaucon. Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching
for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
1. WE ARE OBSESSED WITH POLLS
Ed Koch, the brash mayor of New York City in the 1980s, was famous
for greeting constituents with the question “How’m I doin’?” It was a
humorous reversal of the usual New York “How you doin’?” but it
conveyed the chronic concern of elected officials. Few of us will ever
run for office, yet most of the people we meet belong to one or more
constituencies that we want to win over. Research on self-esteem
suggests that we are all unconsciously asking Koch’s question every
day, in almost every encounter.
For a hundred years, psychologists have written about the need to
think well of oneself. But Mark Leary, a leading researcher on selfconsciousness,
thought that it made no evolutionary sense for there to
be a deep need for self-esteem.15 For millions of years, our ancestors’
survival depended upon their ability to get small groups to include
them and trust them, so if there is any innate drive here, it should be
a drive to get others to think well of us. Based on his review of the
research, Leary suggested that self-esteem is more like an internal
gauge, a “sociometer” that continuously measures your value as a
relationship partner. Whenever the sociometer needle drops, it
triggers an alarm and changes our behavior.
As Leary was developing the sociometer theory in the 1990s, he
kept meeting people who denied that they were affected by what
others thought of them. Do some people truly steer by their own
compass?
Leary decided to put these self-proclaimed mavericks to the test.
First, he had a large group of students rate their self-esteem and how
much it depended on what other people think. Then he picked out the
few people who—question after question—said they were completely
unaffected by the opinions of others, and he invited them to the lab a
few weeks later. As a comparison, he also invited people who had
consistently said that they were strongly affected by what other
people think of them. The test was on.
Everyone had to sit alone in a room and talk about themselves for
five minutes, speaking into a microphone. At the end of each minute
they saw a number flash on a screen in front of them. That number
indicated how much another person listening in from another room
wanted to interact with them in the next part of the study. With
ratings from 1 to 7 (where 7 is best), you can imagine how it would
feel to see the numbers drop while you’re talking:
4 … 3 … 2 … 3 … 2.
In truth, Leary had rigged it. He gave some people declining ratings
while other people got rising ratings: 4 … 5 … 6 … 5 … 6. Obviously
it’s more pleasant to see your numbers rise, but would seeing either
set of numbers (ostensibly from a complete stranger) change what
you believe to be true about yourself, your merits, your self-worth?
Not surprisingly, people who admitted that they cared about other
people’s opinions had big reactions to the numbers. Their self-esteem
sank. But the self-proclaimed mavericks suffered shocks almost as big.
They might indeed have steered by their own compass, but they
didn’t realize that their compass tracked public opinion, not true
north. It was just as Glaucon said.
Leary’s conclusion was that “the sociometer operates at a
nonconscious and preattentive level to scan the social environment
for any and all indications that one’s relational value is low or
declining.”16 The sociometer is part of the elephant. Because
appearing concerned about other people’s opinions makes us look
weak, we (like politicians) often deny that we care about public
opinion polls. But the fact is that we care a lot about what others
think of us. The only people known to have no sociometer are
psychopaths.17
2. OUR IN-HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY AUTOMATICALLY
JUSTIFIES EVERYTHING
If you want to see post hoc reasoning in action, just watch the press
secretary of a president or prime minister take questions from
reporters. No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some
way to praise or defend it. Reporters then challenge assertions and
bring up contradictory quotes from the politician, or even quotes
straight from the press secretary on previous days. Sometimes you’ll
hear an awkward pause as the secretary searches for the right words,
but what you’ll never hear is: “Hey, that’s a great point! Maybe we
should rethink this policy.”
Press secretaries can’t say that because they have no power to make
or revise policy. They’re told what the policy is, and their job is to
find evidence and arguments that will justify the policy to the public.
And that’s one of the rider’s main jobs: to be the full-time in-house
press secretary for the elephant.
In 1960, Peter Wason (creator of the 4-card task from chapter 2)
published his report on the “2–4–6 problem.”18 He showed people a
series of three numbers and told them that the triplet conforms to a
rule. They had to guess the rule by generating other triplets and then
asking the experimenter whether the new triplet conformed to the
rule. When they were confident they had guessed the rule, they were
supposed to tell the experimenter their guess.
Suppose a subject first sees 2–4–6. The subject then generates a
triplet in response: “4–6–8?”
“Yes,” says the experimenter.
“How about 120–122–124?”
“Yes.”
It seemed obvious to most people that the rule was consecutive
even numbers. But the experimenter told them this was wrong, so
they tested out other rules: “3–5–7?”
“Yes.”
“What about 35–37–39?”
“Yes.”
“OK, so the rule must be any series of numbers that rises by two?”
“No.”
People had little trouble generating new hypotheses about the rule,
sometimes quite complex ones. But what they hardly ever did was to
test their hypotheses by offering triplets that did not conform to their
hypothesis. For example, proposing 2–4–5 (yes) and 2–4–3 (no) would
have helped people zero in on the actual rule: any series of ascending
numbers.
Wason called this phenomenon the confirmation bias, the tendency
to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you
already think. People are quite good at challenging statements made
by other people, but if it’s your belief, then it’s your possession—your
child, almost—and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk
losing it.19
Deanna Kuhn, a leading researcher of everyday reasoning, found
evidence of the confirmation bias even when people solve a problem
that is important for survival: knowing what foods make us sick. To
bring this question into the lab she created sets of eight index cards,
each of which showed a cartoon image of a child eating something—
chocolate cake versus carrot cake, for example—and then showed
what happened to the child afterward: the child is smiling, or else is
frowning and looking sick. She showed the cards one at a time, to
children and to adults, and asked them to say whether the “evidence”
(the 8 cards) suggested that either kind of food makes kids sick.
The kids as well as the adults usually started off with a hunch—in
this case, that chocolate cake is the more likely culprit. They usually
concluded that the evidence proved them right. Even when the cards
showed a stronger association between carrot cake and sickness,
people still pointed to the one or two cards with sick chocolate cake
eaters as evidence for their theory, and they ignored the larger
number of cards that incriminated carrot cake. As Kuhn puts it,
people seemed to say to themselves: “Here is some evidence I can
point to as supporting my theory, and therefore the theory is right.”20
This is the sort of bad thinking that a good education should
correct, right? Well, consider the findings of another eminent
reasoning researcher, David Perkins.21 Perkins brought people of
various ages and education levels into the lab and asked them to
think about social issues, such as whether giving schools more money
would improve the quality of teaching and learning. He first asked
subjects to write down their initial judgment. Then he asked them to
think about the issue and write down all the reasons they could think
of—on either side—that were relevant to reaching a final answer.
After they were done, Perkins scored each reason subjects wrote as
either a “my-side” argument or an “other-side” argument.
Not surprisingly, people came up with many more “my-side”
arguments than “other-side” arguments. Also not surprisingly, the
more education subjects had, the more reasons they came up with.
But when Perkins compared fourth-year students in high school,
college, or graduate school to first-year students in those same
schools, he found barely any improvement within each school.
Rather, the high school students who generate a lot of arguments are
the ones who are more likely to go on to college, and the college
students who generate a lot of arguments are the ones who are more
likely to go on to graduate school. Schools don’t teach people to
reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and
people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.
The findings get more disturbing. Perkins found that IQ was by far
the biggest predictor of how well people argued, but it predicted only
the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good
lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at
finding reasons on the other side. Perkins concluded that “people
invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring
the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.”22
Research on everyday reasoning offers little hope for moral
rationalists. In the studies I’ve described, there is no self-interest at
stake. When you ask people about strings of digits, cakes and
illnesses, and school funding, people have rapid, automatic intuitive
reactions. One side looks a bit more attractive than the other. The
elephant leans, ever so slightly, and the rider gets right to work
looking for supporting evidence—and invariably succeeds.
This is how the press secretary works on trivial issues where there
is no motivation to support one side or the other. If thinking is
confirmatory rather than exploratory in these dry and easy cases, then
what chance is there that people will think in an open-minded,
exploratory way when self-interest, social identity, and strong
emotions make them want or even need to reach a preordained
conclusion?
3. WE LIE, CHEAT, AND JUSTIFY SO WELL THAT WE HONESTLY
BELIEVE WE ARE HONEST
In the United Kingdom, members of Parliament (MPs) have long been
allowed to bill taxpayers for the reasonable expense of maintaining a
second home, given that they’re required to spend time in London
and in their home districts. But because the office responsible for
deciding what was reasonable approved nearly every request,
members of Parliament treated it like a big blank check. And because
their expenses were hidden from the public, MPs thought they were
wearing the ring of Gyges—until a newspaper printed a leaked copy
of those expense claims in 2009.23
Just as Glaucon predicted, they had behaved abominably. Many
MPs declared their second home to be whichever one was due for
major and lavish renovations (including dredging the moats). When
the renovations were completed, they simply redesignated their
primary home as their secondary home and renovated that one too,
sometimes selling the newly renovated home for a huge profit.
Late-night comedians are grateful for the never-ending stream of
scandals coming out of London, Washington, and other centers of
power. But are the rest of us any better than our leaders? Or should
we first look for logs in our own eyes?
Many psychologists have studied the effects of having “plausible
deniability.” In one such study, subjects performed a task and were
then given a slip of paper and a verbal confirmation of how much
they were to be paid. But when they took the slip to another room to
get their money, the cashier misread one digit and handed them too
much money. Only 20 percent spoke up and corrected the mistake.24
But the story changed when the cashier asked them if the payment
was correct. In that case, 60 percent said no and returned the extra
money. Being asked directly removes plausible deniability; it would
take a direct lie to keep the money. As a result, people are three times
more likely to be honest.
You can’t predict who will return the money based on how people
rate their own honesty, or how well they are able to give the highminded
answer on a moral dilemma of the sort used by Kohlberg.25 If
the rider were in charge of ethical behavior, then there would be a
big correlation between people’s moral reasoning and their moral
behavior. But he’s not, so there isn’t.
In his book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely describes a brilliant
series of studies in which participants had the opportunity to earn
more money by claiming to have solved more math problems than
they really did. Ariely summarizes his findings from many variations
of the paradigm like this:
When given the opportunity, many honest people will
cheat. In fact, rather than finding that a few bad apples
weighted the averages, we discovered that the majority of
people cheated, and that they cheated just a little bit.26
People didn’t try to get away with as much as they could. Rather,
when Ariely gave them anything like the invisibility of the ring of
Gyges, they cheated only up to the point where they themselves could
no longer find a justification that would preserve their belief in their
own honesty.
The bottom line is that in lab experiments that give people
invisibility combined with plausible deniability, most people cheat. The
press secretary (also known as the inner lawyer)27 is so good at finding
justifications that most of these cheaters leave the experiment as
convinced of their own virtue as they were when they walked in.
4. REASONING (AND GOOGLE) CAN TAKE YOU WHEREVER YOU
WANT TO GO
When my son, Max, was three years old, I discovered that he’s
allergic to must. When I would tell him that he must get dressed so
that we can go to school (and he loved to go to school), he’d scowl
and whine. The word must is a little verbal handcuff that triggered in
him the desire to squirm free.
The word can is so much nicer: “Can you get dressed, so that we
can go to school?” To be certain that these two words were really
night and day, I tried a little experiment. After dinner one night, I
said “Max, you must eat ice cream now.”
“But I don’t want to!”
Four seconds later: “Max, you can have ice cream if you want.”
“I want some!”
The difference between can and must is the key to understanding
the profound effects of self-interest on reasoning. It’s also the key to
understanding many of the strangest beliefs—in UFO abductions,
quack medical treatments, and conspiracy theories.
The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive
mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that when
we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe it?”28
Then (as Kuhn and Perkins found), we search for supporting evidence,
and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop
thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification,
in case anyone asks.
In contrast, when we don’t want to believe something, we ask
ourselves, “Must I believe it?” Then we search for contrary evidence,
and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it.
You only need one key to unlock the handcuffs of must.
Psychologists now have file cabinets full of findings on “motivated
reasoning,”29 showing the many tricks people use to reach the
conclusions they want to reach. When subjects are told that an
intelligence test gave them a low score, they choose to read articles
criticizing (rather than supporting) the validity of IQ tests.30 When
people read a (fictitious) scientific study that reports a link between
caffeine consumption and breast cancer, women who are heavy coffee
drinkers find more flaws in the study than do men and less
caffeinated women.31 Pete Ditto, at the University of California at
Irvine, asked subjects to lick a strip of paper to determine whether
they have a serious enzyme deficiency. He found that people wait
longer for the paper to change color (which it never does) when a
color change is desirable than when it indicates a deficiency, and
those who get the undesirable prognosis find more reasons why the
test might not be accurate (for example, “My mouth was unusually
dry today”).32
The difference between a mind asking “Must I believe it?” versus
“Can I believe it?” is so profound that it even influences visual
perception. Subjects who thought that they’d get something good if a
computer flashed up a letter rather than a number were more likely
to see the ambiguous figure as the letter B, rather than as the
number 13.33
If people can literally see what they want to see—given a bit of
ambiguity—is it any wonder that scientific studies often fail to
persuade the general public? Scientists are really good at finding
flaws in studies that contradict their own views, but it sometimes
happens that evidence accumulates across many studies to the point
where scientists must change their minds. I’ve seen this happen in my
colleagues (and myself) many times,34 and it’s part of the
accountability system of science—you’d look foolish clinging to
discredited theories. But for nonscientists, there is no such thing as a
study you must believe. It’s always possible to question the methods,
find an alternative interpretation of the data, or, if all else fails,
question the honesty or ideology of the researchers.
And now that we all have access to search engines on our cell
phones, we can call up a team of supportive scientists for almost any
conclusion twenty-four hours a day. Whatever you want to believe
about the causes of global warming or whether a fetus can feel pain,
just Google your belief. You’ll find partisan websites summarizing and
sometimes distorting relevant scientific studies. Science is a
smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that’s right for
you.
5. WE CAN BELIEVE ALMOST ANYTHING THAT SUPPORTS OUR
TEAM
Many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly,
choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. But
decades of research on public opinion have led to the conclusion that
self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences. Parents of
children in public school are not more supportive of government aid
to schools than other citizens; young men subject to the draft are not
more opposed to military escalation than men too old to be drafted;
and people who lack health insurance are not more likely to support
government-issued health insurance than people covered by
insurance.35
Rather, people care about their groups, whether those be racial,
regional, religious, or political. The political scientist Don Kinder
summarizes the findings like this: “In matters of public opinion,
citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but
rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’ ”36 Political opinions function as
“badges of social membership.”37 They’re like the array of bumper
stickers people put on their cars showing the political causes,
universities, and sports teams they support. Our politics is groupish,
not selfish.
If people can see what they want to see in the figure , just imagine
how much room there is for partisans to see different facts in the
social world.38 Several studies have documented the “attitude
polarization” effect that happens when you give a single body of
information to people with differing partisan leanings. Liberals and
conservatives actually move further apart when they read about
research on whether the death penalty deters crime, or when they
rate the quality of arguments made by candidates in a presidential
debate, or when they evaluate arguments about affirmative action or
gun control.39
In 2004, in the heat of the U.S. presidential election, Drew Westen
used fMRI to catch partisan brains in action.40 He recruited fifteen
highly partisan Democrats and fifteen highly partisan Republicans
and brought them into the scanner one at a time to watch eighteen
sets of slides. The first slide in each set showed either a statement
from President George W. Bush or one from his Democratic
challenger, John Kerry. For example, people saw a quote from Bush
in 2000 praising Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron, which later collapsed
when its massive frauds came to light:
I love the man.… When I’m president, I plan to run the
government like a CEO runs a country. Ken Lay and Enron
are a model of how I’ll do that.
Then they saw a slide describing an action taken later that seemed
to contradict the earlier statement:
Mr. Bush now avoids any mention of Ken Lay, and is
critical of Enron when asked.
At this point, Republicans were squirming. But right then, Westen
showed them another slide that gave more context, resolving the
contradiction:
People who know the President report that he feels
betrayed by Ken Lay, and was genuinely shocked to find
that Enron’s leadership had been corrupt.
There was an equivalent set of slides showing Kerry caught in a
contradiction and then released. In other words, Westen engineered
situations in which partisans would temporarily feel threatened by
their candidates’ apparent hypocrisy. At the same time, they’d feel no
threat—and perhaps even pleasure—when it was the other party’s
guy who seemed to have been caught.
Westen was actually pitting two models of the mind against each
other. Would subjects reveal Jefferson’s dual-process model, in which
the head (the reasoning parts of the brain) processes information
about contradictions equally for all targets, but then gets overruled by
a stronger response from the heart (the emotion areas)? Or does the
partisan brain work as Hume says, with emotional and intuitive
processes running the show and only putting in a call to reasoning
when its services are needed to justify a desired conclusion?
The data came out strongly supporting Hume. The threatening
information (their own candidate’s hypocrisy) immediately activated
a network of emotion-related brain areas—areas associated with
negative emotion and responses to punishment.41 The handcuffs (of
“Must I believe it?”) hurt.
Some of these areas are known to play a role in reasoning, but
there was no increase in activity in the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex
(dlPFC). The dlPFC is the main area for cool reasoning tasks.42
Whatever thinking partisans were doing, it was not the kind of
objective weighing or calculating that the dlPFC is known for.43
Once Westen released them from the threat, the ventral striatum
started humming—that’s one of the brain’s major reward centers. All
animal brains are designed to create flashes of pleasure when the
animal does something important for its survival, and small pulses of
the neurotransmitter dopamine in the ventral striatum (and a few
other places) are where these good feelings are manufactured. Heroin
and cocaine are addictive because they artificially trigger this
dopamine response. Rats who can press a button to deliver electrical
stimulation to their reward centers will continue pressing until they
collapse from starvation.44
Westen found that partisans escaping from handcuffs (by thinking
about the final slide, which restored their confidence in their
candidate) got a little hit of that dopamine. And if this is true, then it
would explain why extreme partisans are so stubborn, closed-minded,
and committed to beliefs that often seem bizarre or paranoid. Like
rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply
unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been
reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free
it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally
addictive.
THE RATIONALIST DELUSION
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines delusion as “a false
conception and persistent belief unconquerable by reason in
something that has no existence in fact.”45 As an intuitionist, I’d say
that the worship of reason is itself an illustration of one of the most
long-lived delusions in Western history: the rationalist delusion. It’s
the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us
like the gods (for Plato) or that brings us beyond the “delusion” of
believing in gods (for the New Atheists).46 The rationalist delusion is
not just a claim about human nature. It’s also a claim that the rational
caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power, and it
usually comes along with a utopian program for raising more rational
children.47
From Plato through Kant and Kohlberg, many rationalists have
asserted that the ability to reason well about ethical issues causes
good behavior. They believe that reasoning is the royal road to moral
truth, and they believe that people who reason well are more likely to
act morally.
But if that were the case, then moral philosophers—who reason
about ethical principles all day long—should be more virtuous than
other people. Are they? The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel tried to
find out. He used surveys and more surreptitious methods to measure
how often moral philosophers give to charity, vote, call their mothers,
donate blood, donate organs, clean up after themselves at philosophy
conferences, and respond to emails purportedly from students.48 And
in none of these ways are moral philosophers better than other
philosophers or professors in other fields.
Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens
of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are
presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen
or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.49 In
other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve
moral behavior, and it might even make it worse (perhaps by making
the rider more skilled at post hoc justification). Schwitzgebel still has
yet to find a single measure on which moral philosophers behave
better than other philosophers.
Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all
need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for
what it is. The French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan
Sperber recently reviewed the vast research literature on motivated
reasoning (in social psychology) and on the biases and errors of
reasoning (in cognitive psychology). They concluded that most of the
bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you
see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help
us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context
of discussions with other people. As they put it, “skilled
arguers … are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their
views.”50 This explains why the confirmation bias is so powerful, and
so ineradicable. How hard could it be to teach students to look on the
other side, to look for evidence against their favored view? Yet, in
fact, it’s very hard, and nobody has yet found a way to do it.51 It’s
hard because the confirmation bias is a built-in feature (of an
argumentative mind), not a bug that can be removed (from a platonic
mind).
I’m not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut
feelings. Gut feelings are sometimes better guides than reasoning for
making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments,52 but they are
often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law.53
Rather, what I’m saying is that we must be wary of any individual’s
ability to reason. We should see each individual as being limited, like
a neuron. A neuron is really good at one thing: summing up the
stimulation coming into its dendrites to “decide” whether to fire a
pulse along its axon. A neuron by itself isn’t very smart. But if you put
neurons together in the right way you get a brain; you get an
emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single
neuron.
In the same way, each individual reasoner is really good at one
thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already
holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals
to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly
when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put
individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can
use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all
individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them
to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing
good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is
why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity
within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an
intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good
public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).
And if our goal is to produce good behavior, not just good thinking,
then it’s even more important to reject rationalism and embrace
intuitionism. Nobody is ever going to invent an ethics class that
makes people behave ethically after they step out of the classroom.
Classes are for riders, and riders are just going to use their new
knowledge to serve their elephants more effectively. If you want to
make people behave more ethically, there are two ways you can go.
You can change the elephant, which takes a long time and is hard to
do. Or, to borrow an idea from the book Switch, by Chip Heath and
Dan Heath,54 you can change the path that the elephant and rider
find themselves traveling on. You can make minor and inexpensive
tweaks to the environment, which can produce big increases in
ethical behavior.55 You can hire Glaucon as a consultant and ask him
how to design institutions in which real human beings, always
concerned about their reputations, will behave more ethically.
IN SUM
The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic
reasoning second. To demonstrate the strategic functions of moral
reasoning, I reviewed five areas of research showing that moral
thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist
searching for truth:
• We are obsessively concerned about what others think of
us, although much of the concern is unconscious and
invisible to us.
• Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who
automatically justifies any position taken by the president.
• With the help of our press secretary, we are able to lie and
cheat often, and then cover it up so effectively that we
convince even ourselves.
• Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to
reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to
believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t
want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the
first question and no to the second.
• In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather
than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our
team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.
I concluded by warning that the worship of reason, which is
sometimes found in philosophical and scientific circles, is a delusion.
It is an example of faith in something that does not exist. I urged
instead a more intuitionist approach to morality and moral education,
one that is more humble about the abilities of individuals, and more
attuned to the contexts and social systems that enable people to think
and act well.
I have tried to make a reasoned case that our moral capacities are
best described from an intuitionist perspective. I do not claim to have
examined the question from all sides, nor to have offered irrefutable
proof. Because of the insurmountable power of the confirmation bias,
counterarguments will have to be produced by those who disagree
with me. Eventually, if the scientific community works as it is
supposed to, the truth will emerge as a large number of flawed and
limited minds battle it out.
This concludes Part I of this book, which was about the first principle
of moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. To
explain this principle I used the metaphor of the mind as a rider
(reasoning) on an elephant (intuition), and I said that the rider’s
function is to serve the elephant. Reasoning matters, particularly
because reasons do sometimes influence other people, but most of the
action in moral psychology is in the intuitions. In Part II I’ll get much
more specific about what those intuitions are and where they came
from. I’ll draw a map of moral space, and I’ll show why that map is
usually more favorable to conservative politicians than to liberals.