Cognitive Chicanery
Five ways we dodge facts that offend us
This is the latest post in my series on The Science of Controversial Science. You can find the full collection here.
If there’s one thing we all like to believe about ourselves, it’s that we’re open-minded truth-seekers, dutifully following the evidence wherever it leads. But as anyone who’s studied human psychology for more than five seconds can tell you, the truth is a little more complicated - and a lot less flattering.
A new paper by Cory Clark and colleagues offers a sobering look at our less noble epistemic instincts. Across five well-powered experiments (four pre-registered; total N = 7,040), Clark and her team document a range of mental maneuvers that people use to downplay or dismiss scientific claims they find unpleasant. They call the use of these maneuvers cognitive chicanery, and they divide them into five broad categories:
Motivated Confusion - dismissing a claim as incomprehensible (“I don’t understand it, so it must be wrong”).
Motivated Postmodernism - denying that the question can be addressed empirically (“This isn’t even the kind of thing science can study”).
The CIA’s Strategies for Citizen-Saboteurs - derailing the discussion with nitpicking and procedural quibbles.
Schopenhauer’s Stratagems for Always Being Right - everything from straw-manning to attacking the messenger.
Contradictory Criticisms - endorsing mutually exclusive criticisms, such as that the researchers are both dimwitted and clever manipulators.
In this post, I’ll outline Clark and colleagues’ research - and what it reveals about our tendency to protect our beliefs at all costs.
