Why do facts and evidence so seldom sway people from deeply held ideas? It is because we have armament to prevent that from happening. Over the past decade, our pages have been filled with mentions of this problem. In this issue, David Robert Grimes takes a deep dive into the psychological concept that explains it: motivated reasoning—an inherently biased form of decision-making in which instead of evaluating evidence dispassionately, we interpret evidence only to affirm a preexisting belief. As he says, “It demands impossibly stringent standards for any evidence contrary to one’s beliefs, while accepting uncritically even the flimsiest evidence for any ideas that suit one’s needs.” While it has long been part of the human condition, we have seen the ills of motivated reasoning burst onto the public scene in recent years. It explains so much of the discord and disconnection from reality we witness in public discourse.
Grimes gets into his topic via Joseph Stalin and Trofim Lysenko in communist Russia. Lysenko captured Stalin’s favor by advocating pseudoscientific ideas about how to increase the yield of wheat crops. The view reinforced Marxist doctrine. Scientists with real knowledge of plants were suppressed, persecuted, and tortured; genetics became a taboo topic; the whole affair set back Soviet biology for decades. Lysenkoism has long been cited as a pernicious example of what can happen when a political regime embraces a pseudoscientific concept. Grimes reveals it as an equally egregious example of motivated reasoning gone wild. But it is not just for the pages of history. Opposition to climate science uses the same processes, and all manner of irrational beliefs today get accepted because they fit personal, religious, or ideological views. Yet, as Grimes notes, “Reality doesn’t care one iota for what we believe.” The question is: Do we care one iota about reality? We had better.