Motivated reasoning works because it eliminates the need for you to be actively deceptive, manipulative, or unethical. People’s detectors for those behaviors don’t fire, because you don’t even know you’re doing it. You think you’re being honest and ethical; but you believe the right things to make your honest and ethical behavior serve your interests. So it’s a win-win.
I think what you’re missing is the severe cognitive limitations we work under. Even those of us who have practiced analysis of complex situations and ourselves don’t have time to apply this carefully. And if we did do all of that analysis to figure out where , we don’t have the acting skills to pull off being deceptive or manipulative when it’s the best strategy.
Motivated reasoning is also just our default mode of reasoning; we mix together the vague reward from “this is probably right which is often helpful” with “I think believing this will probably get me rewards” (e.g., from people wanting to be my friend and help me.
Motivated reasoning works because it eliminates the need for you to be actively deceptive, manipulative, or unethical. People’s detectors for those behaviors don’t fire, because you don’t even know you’re doing it. You think you’re being honest and ethical; but you believe the right things to make your honest and ethical behavior serve your interests. So it’s a win-win.
I think what you’re missing is the severe cognitive limitations we work under. Even those of us who have practiced analysis of complex situations and ourselves don’t have time to apply this carefully. And if we did do all of that analysis to figure out where , we don’t have the acting skills to pull off being deceptive or manipulative when it’s the best strategy.
Motivated reasoning is also just our default mode of reasoning; we mix together the vague reward from “this is probably right which is often helpful” with “I think believing this will probably get me rewards” (e.g., from people wanting to be my friend and help me.