Psychology and neuroscience agree, the research on this is clear. The more intelligent you are, and the more educated, the better you become at rationaling and justifying your existing beliefs and attitudes, regardless of their accuracy or harmfulness.
There is evidence to suggest this is because we are social animals first and individual reasoners second, a system built on top of another system, biologically via evolution. Why does that matter?
Because we depend on our groups to come to a consensus via deliberation and argumentation before we pursue goals or settle on attitudes. Reasonings role is produce biased arguments for your own perspective. Basically, all culture is “12 Angry Men” at scale.
Almost every cognitive bias and flawed heuristic and logical fallacy plummets in its impact on decision-making when people reason in groups, but only if those groups are allowed to argue freely without social costs for dissent or subversion.
So if you want better reasoning, create better groups and better platforms for people to meet up and argue. Otherwise, we will be biased by reputation management and use motivated reasoning to arrive at inaccurate conclusions and potentially harmful attitudes. END
