Motivated Reasoning Quotes

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one's emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications - in order to hide one's motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion, and, ultimately, the destruction of one's cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.

No evidence against a firmly-held belief, no matter how good or abundant it may be, will sway the true believer.

Men quickly find a theory that adapts itself to their desires.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

No executive devotes effort to proving himself wrong.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.

People readily believe what they want to believe.

To seek a justification for a decision already made.

It is the habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire

Men who cannot deceive others are very often successful at deceiving themselves.

We do the same thing in our own lives, embracing information that supports what we already prefer or vindicates choices we previously made.After all, it feels better to justify our opinions rather than challenge them, to contemplate only the pros and relegate the cons to the back of our minds. However, if we want to make the most of choice, we have to be willing to make ourselves uncomfortable. The question is, if we are willing, how exactly do we go about fortifying ourselves against these biases?

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.

Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

Most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They become people of whom Philip Wylie observed: "You couldn't 't squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn."

No evidence is powerful enough to force acceptance of a conclusion that is emotionally distasteful.

In matters of faith, inconvenient evidence is always suppressed while contradictions go unnoticed.

When people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.