Steven Pinker on Rationality

The world seems awash with irrationality, evident in anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and political conspirators. What is to be done? Steven Pinker’s spirited, amusing, and lucid new book argues that the solution comes from increasing the amount of rationality in the world, accomplished by expanding people's understanding of logic, probability, rational choice, and causal reasoning. But helping people to be more rational in their thoughts and actions needs improvements in empathy and politics as well as critical thinking.

Pinker provides clear and useful expositions of topics like the contribution of probability theory to producing better beliefs and actions, and the difference between correlation and causation. He then moves on to consideration of why humanity appears to be losing its mind, as shown in the “carnival of cockamamie conspiracy theories” about COVID-19, such as that vaccines implant microchips in people’s bodies.

Pinker discounts three popular explanations for why people succumb to such nonsense.

The first is that people fall prey to the systematic thinking errors that philosophers call fallacies and psychologists call biases. The second is that the "pandemic of poppycock" results from the prevalence of social media. The third is that people embrace false beliefs that give them comfort or help them make sense of the world. Instead, he thinks that irrationality arises largely from motivated reasoning and what he calls "myside bias.”

Motivated reasoning is the tendency to base conclusions on personal goals and emotions rather than on objective evidence (Kunda, 1990). We all want to believe that we are going to be happy, healthy, successful, and loved, so we distort evidence to help us think that these goals are being accomplished. I agree with Pinker that motivated reasoning is a major cause of false beliefs about COVID-19 (e.g., I’m not going to get sick, so I don’t need to be vaccinated), climate change (e.g., the weather just fluctuates, so I don’t need to change my energy habits), and politics (e.g., my wonderful leader will solve my economic problems).

Pinker’s second major source of irrationality is myside bias, which Pinker interprets as the tendency of people to reason to conclusions that enhance the correctness of their political, religious, ethnic, or cultural tribe. For example, conservatives want to support the beliefs of other conservatives, and liberals want to support the beliefs of other liberals. Pinker’s myside bias is narrower than the usual interpretation of myside bias that “occurs when we evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner favorable toward our prior opinions and attitudes” (Stanovich, 2021).

Here myside bias is equivalent to motivated reasoning, whereas Pinker applies it to cases where people reason to support their tribe’s interests even when they go against personal motivations. Usually, however, people’s need to belong to and identify with social groups provides a strong motivation to support their beliefs. So I think that Pinker’s narrow idea of myside bias is just a special case of motivated reasoning.

Pinker does not address the question of why people are so prone to making motivated inferences that turn out to be false. In a recent article, “How Rationality is Bounded by the Brain,” I explain the tendency of people to succumb to motivated reasoning as the result of the tight integration of cognition and emotion in the brain. In general, this integration is beneficial because it keeps people’s thinking focused on what emotions indicate are important to their well-being. But integration causes problems when people’s motivations swamp their ability to draw conclusions based on good evidence. Other limitations of the brain that hinder rationality are its slowness and restricted size, along with imperfections in attention and consciousness.

Taking action against irrationality

These limitations raise the question of whether critical thinking is always the best way to overcome irrationality. Most of Pinker’s book concerns using good reasoning strategies such as logic and probability to overcome people’s tendencies to fall into inferential illusions. But another way to help people to overcome errors in thought and action is more like psychotherapy than logic. My blog post on motivational interviewing conjectures that a technique based on questioning and empathy might be better at overcoming motivated inference than more conventional applications of critical thinking. Experiments are needed to compare the two approaches.

Another strategy for overcoming the spread of irrationality is political action to limit the effects of irresponsible social media. Pinker dismisses social media as the main cause of the current prevalence of so many false beliefs but ignores the fact that most people today with false beliefs about COVID-19, climate change, and political conspiracies get them from social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Whatsapp. Explanation of rampant misinformation requires consideration of both psychological mechanisms, such as motivated reasoning, and social mechanisms that make the spread of false beliefs and evil attitudes far more rapid than by conversation and conventional news sources. Political action can help to reduce the social spread of irrationality by making social media more responsible for the nonsense they propagate and by eliminating monopolistic control by a few currently dominant companies.

Motivated Reasoning Essential Reads

“Aha” Moments: Buds of Beauty and Brilliance

Motivated Reasoning Plus Ideology Can Make You Foolish

I agree with Pinker that the world desperately needs more rationality, but critical thinking needs to combine with empathy and political action to combat the rampant spread of misinformation.