Paul Statt Communications

Chris Mooney, writing about the recently un-raptured believers, climate change skeptics, and Moms who refuse to vaccinate, in Mother Jones (“Rapture Ready: The Science of Self Delusion,”  May/June 2011) comes to the melancholy conclusion that science has proven that science seldom changes anyone’s mind; rather,

people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs.

Mooney writes

…when we think we’re reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. Or to use an analogy offered by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt: We may think we’re being scientists, but we’re actually being lawyers (PDF). Our “reasoning” is a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases. They include “confirmation bias,” in which we give greater heed to evidence and arguments that bolster our beliefs, and “disconfirmation bias,” in which we expend disproportionate energy trying to debunk or refute views and arguments that we find uncongenial.

I recommend Haidt’s essay, “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail,” published in Psychological Review in 2001. He has a gift for a telling analogy, as evidenced by the title. Involved as I am in public health law research, I am most taken by what Haidt calls

The Motivated Reasoning Problem: The
Reasoning Process Is More like a Lawyer Defending
a Client than a Judge or Scientist Seeking Truth.

But this metaphor describes pretty accurately the way that that public health research is incorporated into public health law: Something terrible happens, a law is passed in response, and (maybe) later we get around to research to show that the law worked. A teen texting and driving is killed in an automobile accident; citizens demand a response, and a law is passed. This seems modeled on what Haidt calls “social intuitionism.”

The central claim of the social intuitionist model is that moral judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions, and is followed (when needed) by slow, ex-post facto moral reasoning.

It also helps explain why there is such a bewildering variety of laws about distracted driving, for instance. And why all these laws seem to be based on no conclusive evidence.

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108 (4), 814-834 DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814