Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber say reasoning “does not mean what we think it means”:
Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology or reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis.
I like a conceptual take-down of rational choice theory as much as the next guy, but I wonder why it has to be either-or. Personally, I think reasoning is context dependent. There are times where I reason to win an argument and there are times when I reason to show how smart I am and cover up any baseline insecurities I might have 🙂 It would be great if scholarship started moving beyond hot vs. cold cognition to looking at when cognition is hot and when it is cold.
Comments 3
Reason and the confirmation bias « Chris Beardsley's Personal Blog — July 30, 2010
[...] 30, 2010 by chrisabeardsley ThickCulture has found an interesting study that I really need to print out and read in detail at some point. [...]
Don Waisanen — August 13, 2010
There's this whole debate going on in the deliberation literature trying to connect why we reason to citizens' motivations for public participation. Habermas frames human motivations for reasoning in terms of an instrumental need for coordinating positions and interests. There's some alternative interpretations for why we reason, though, such as in Svennson's "Expressive Rationality: A Different Approach for Understanding Participation in Municipal Deliberative" (2008, in Communication, Culture & Critique). This article basically argues that citizens are largely motivated by "expressive rationality"--or opportunities "to express, perform, create and recreate identities and their meanings" (214). Reasoning thus becomes meaningful and relevant for people when the opportunity for expressive rationality is manifest in any one situation. I'd agree that reasoning is context-dependent and furthermore, multimodal, so that different kinds of rationality get employed in different circumstances. But, without going all structuralist, I also think that understanding some common baseline motives or patterns (perhaps with more comparative research) in why we reason will go a long way toward fostering citizen involvement in the future--beyond narrowly conceived understandings of rationality that may make the public sphere seem inaccessible to many.
jose — August 13, 2010
Great minds think alike ;-)