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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy

Thursday, July 31, 2014

How politics makes us stupid

By Ezra Klein
Vox.com
Originally published April 6, 2014 (How did I miss this?)

Here is an excerpt:

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.

The entire article is here.