The Republican Brain by is Mooney Read Free Book Online Page A

system react now that it had been soundly refuted?
    At first, the group struggled for an explanation. But then rationalization set in. Conveniently, a new message arrived via Mrs. Keech’s pen, announcing that they’d all been spared at the last minute. As Festinger summarized the new pronouncement from the stars: “The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.” Their willingness to believe in the prophecy had saved everyone on Earth from the prophecy!
    From that day forward, Mrs. Keech and her followers, previously shy of the press and indifferent toward evangelizing, began to proselytize about their beliefs. “Their sense of urgency was enormous,” wrote Festinger. The devastation of all they had believed made them more sure of their beliefs than ever.

    In the annals of delusion and denial, you don’t get much more extreme than Mrs. Keech and her followers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. Mrs. Keech’s small group of UFO obsessives would lie at one end of the spectrum of human self-delusion—and at the other would stand an utterly dispassionate scientist, who carefully updates her conclusions based on each new piece of evidence.
    The fact, though, is that all of us are susceptible to such follies of “reasoning,” even if we’re rarely so extreme.
    To see as much, let’s ask the question: What was going through the minds of Mrs. Keech and her followers when they reinterpreted a clear and direct refutation of their belief system into a confirmation of it? Festinger came up with a theory called “cognitive dissonance” to explain this occurrence. The idea is that when the mind holds thoughts or ideas that are in conflict, or when it is assaulted by facts that contradict core beliefs, this creates an unpleasant sensation or discomfort—and so one moves to resolve the dissonance by bringing ideas into compatibility again. The goal isn’t accuracy per se; it’s to achieve consistency between one’s beliefs—and prior beliefs and commitments, especially strong emotional ones, take precedence. Thus, the disconfirming information was rendered consistent with the Seekers’ “theory” by turning it into a confirmation.
    You might think of Festinger’s work on the Seekers as a kind of midpoint between the depictions contained in psychologically insightful 19th-century novels like Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations —whose main character, Pip, is a painful study in self-delusion—and what we’re now learning from modern neuroscience. Since Festinger’s day, an array of new discoveries have further demonstrated how our pre-existing beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts, and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions.
    The result of these developments is that cognitive dissonance theory has been somewhat updated, although certainly not discarded. One source of confusion is that in light of modern neuroscience, the word “cognitive”—which in common parlance would seem to suggest conscious thought—can be misleading, as we now know that much of this is occurring in an automatic, subconscious way. Cognitive dissonance theory still successfully explains many psychological observations and results, with a classic example being how smokers rationalize the knowledge that they’re signing their death warrant (“but it keeps me thin; I’ll quit later when my looks don’t matter so much”). But its core findings are increasingly being subsumed under a theory called “motivated reasoning.”
    This theory builds on one of the key insights of modern neuroscience: Thinking and reasoning are actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). And not just