Despite spending most of my life observing politics, I am still surprised that intelligent people can excuse almost any kind of incompetence, inconsistency or impropriety, as long as the wrongful acts are performed by political allies.

Why Facts don’t Change Our Minds by Elizabeth Kolbert published in 2017 by New Yorker magazine helps explain the puzzle.

Researchers had presented shifting scenarios to volunteers and concluded:

Once formed, impressions are remarkably perseverant. Even after the evidence for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs.

Ms. Kolbert adds:

Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. 

She refers to The Enigma of Reason from Harvard University Press by European researchers.

If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue is not geared to arriving at better beliefs and decisions. What reason does is help us justify our beliefs... Reason is biased in favor of what we already believe…

Mercier told The Washington Post that people mostly reason to find arguments that whatever they were already thinking is a good idea.

Objectively, a reasoning mechanism that aims at sounder knowledge and better decisions should focus on reasons why we might be wrong and reasons why other options than our initial hunch might be correct. Such a mechanism should also critically evaluate whether the reasons supporting our initial hunch are strong. But reasoning does the opposite. It mostly looks for reasons that support our initial hunches and deems even weak, superficial reasons to be sufficient.

Of course Mercier is not against reasoning; he wants it to be more effective. However, he proposes that discussions involving numerous people are likely to be less beneficial.

Larger groups are less conducive to efficient argumentation because the normal back and forth of discussion breaks down when you have more than about five people talking together. 

This may explain why conversations on social media and in Legislatures and Parliaments have so little value. Many people talk, few listen, and almost no one alters their thinking.

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