I've often wondered, sometimes aloud, why it is that some people are not persuaded by what I consider the facts of the situation and choose, instead, to continue with what I perceive as wrong-headed thinking. Whether the discussion is about complex topics like climate change or relatively simple ones like abortion rights (simple in the sense that it is a fairly black-and-white issue), there are times when I feel like the logic and/or facts of the world clearly show there is only one possible answer and yet know of other people (very similar to me) who are equally unconvinced. It is too simplistic and just plain wrong to assume that it has anything to do with IQ, so it probably isn't the case that all the people who don't see things my way are just plain stupid, yet clearly there is something different about us.

Perusing the CBC website comments on some political story popped up this story on Mother Jones and while it doesn't leave me with the warm and fuzzies for our future, it does at least give me an understanding of why it seems that some people add 2 + 2 and come up with grapefruit. There seems to be a science involved in the art of self-deception, and what I found most interesting is that there appears to be a stronger bias for so-called right-wing conservatives, a hard-wiring if you will, that allows them to justify to themselves and others their point of view...and ironically, so the science says, the stronger the evidence against a "man with a conviction" the more effort he will put in to defending his position.

It isn't exclusively conservative and in fact has nothing really to do with being a conservative at all, but generally the types of Hierarchical Individualists (think entrepreneur) that make up a large percentage of the "right" are also more likely to refute science and common-sense to firm up their own mistaken view. I honestly thought the self-deception was simple greed, that most people who (for instance) believe that Climate Change / Global Warming etc does not exist wrestled with their conscience in the dark, but it seems that no such wrestle takes place for the belief system is strong.

I'm not 100% sure what to do with this bit of knowledge, but I am going to try to understand how to use it in future debates. It seems that the problem isn't cognition but emotion, that IQ has much less importance than EQ (emotional quotient). That's interesting because of a recent Facebook status update from a friend, JP Harris, who said as much with many fewer words. At the time I wasn't sure i believed it, though I certainly have believed in a healthy EQ for a long time, I thought that brains would always win ... now I'm not so sure.

But the article has made me pause and think about my own decision making process; where there times that my own dogmatic viewpoint dominated my logic? The study suggests that we are all hard-wired to some point to want to reaffirm that which we believe and disaffirm that which we fail to believe, so on the face of it I'm not alone. But I'm not much more an "Egalitarian Communalist" than I am a "Hierarchical Individualist". pretty close to a centrist (a fence-sitter if there ever was one). I like to think I use logic, science and facts to form correct conclusions and make the right decisions and that when I fail it is because I didn't have all the facts, the science was weak or the logic unclear. Some of that is undoubtedly true but I now wonder how much I delude myself into believing fiction is fact, the science is clear (or not) and the logic sound.

Maybe, just maybe mind you, I might actually be wrong. How does one recognize that situation? I guess it'll just have to be something else I need to learn.