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

that: Many of our reactions to stimuli and information are neither reflective nor dispassionate, but rather emotional and automatic, and set in motion prior to (and often in the absence of) conscious thought.
    Neuroscientists now know that the vast majority of the brain’s actions occur subconsciously and automatically. We are only aware of a very small fraction of what the brain is up to—some estimates suggest about 2 percent. In other words, not only do we feel before we think—but most of the time, we don’t even reach the second step. And even when we get there, our emotions are often guiding our reasoning.
    I’ll sketch out why the brain operates in this way in a moment. For now, just consider the consequences: Our prior emotional commitments—operating in a way we’re not even aware of—often cause us to misread all kinds of evidence, or selectively interpret it to favor what we already believe. This kind of response has been found repeatedly in psychology studies. People read and respond even to scientific or technical evidence so as to justify their pre-existing beliefs.
    In a classic 1979 experiment, for instance, pro- and anti-death penalty advocates were exposed to descriptions of two fake scientific studies, one supporting and one undermining the notion that capital punishment deters violent crime and, in particular, murder. They were also shown detailed methodological discussions and critiques of the fake studies—and, cleverly, the researchers had ensured that each study design sometimes produced a pro-deterrent, and sometimes an anti-deterrent, conclusion. Thus, in a scientific sense, no study was “stronger” than another—they were all equally conjured out of thin air.
    Yet in each case, and regardless of its design, advocates more heavily criticized studies whose conclusions disagreed with their own, while describing studies that were more ideologically congenial as more “convincing.”
    Since then, similar results have been found for how people respond to “evidence” and studies about affirmative action and gun control, the accuracy of gay stereotypes, and much more. Motivated reasoning emerges again and again. Even when study subjects are explicitly instructed to be unbiased and evenhanded about the evidence, they often fail. They see what they want to see, guided by where they’re coming from.

    Why do people behave like this, and respond in this way in controlled psychology studies? What’s so powerful about the theory of motivated reasoning is that we can now sketch out, to a significant extent, how the process occurs in the human brain—and why we have brains that go through such a process to begin with.
    Evolution built the human brain—but not all at once. The brain has been described as a “confederation of systems” with different evolutionary ages and purposes. Many of these systems, and especially the older ones, are closely related to those that we find in other animals. Others are more unique to us—they evolved alongside the rapid increase in the size of our brains that allowed us to become homo sapiens , somewhere in Africa well over 150,000 years ago.
    The systems of the human brain work very well together. Evolution wouldn’t have built an information processing machine that tended to get you killed. But there are also some oddities that arise because evolution could only build onto what it already had, jury-rigging and tweaking rather than designing something new from the ground up.
    As a result of this tinkering, we essentially find ourselves with an evolutionarily older brain lying beneath and enveloped by a newer brain, both bound together and acting in coordination. The older parts—the subcortex, the limbic regions—tend to be involved in emotional or automatic responses. These are stark and binary reactions—not discerning or discriminating. And they occur extremely rapidly,