The article begins,
People reason chiefly to persuade others that they are
right, not to find out what is true.
So claim Hugo Mercier, a postdoctoral fellow in economics
and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and Dan Sperber, a
philosopher and cognitive scientist at the Central European University, in
their provocative 2010 article, “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an
Argumentative Theory,” in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Now a new study by the Yale Cultural Cognition Project finds
that people also use reason to convince themselves, in the face of evidence to
the contrary, that they and those on their side are right.
File under “You don’t say!”
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