Smart people are sometimes the last to realize that the cognitive ship they are captaining is about to sink. Sometimes they don't even recognize that their ship is already under water.
Research suggests intelligence might actually make motivated reasoning worse: smart people are better at mobilizing sophisticated tools and conjuring rationalizations for their doomed enterprise.
Annie Duke, the professional poker player, put it perfectly: “The smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view.” I know this intimately because I lived it.
Back in 2015, when ego depletion was under attack, I desperately tried to keep my theoretical ship afloat. My response? I co-authored a paper throwing every statistical tool at this body of work. Depending on how you analyzed the data, the effect could be modest, tiny, or nonexistent. We concluded that maybe, just maybe, there was still someth…
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