posted March 08, 2014 07:50 AM            

A few quotes:

• We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.

• The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it.
  
• when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing.
  
• people's deep-seated views about morality, and about the way society should be ordered, strongly predict whom they consider to be a legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and thus where they consider "scientific consensus" to lie on contested issues.

------------------
“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”

¯ Neil deGrasse Tyson