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that good arguments, widely disseminated, would win the day. The way the mind works, however, suggests that good arguments will only win the day when people don’t have strong emotional commitments that contradict them. Or to employ lingo sometimes used by the psychologists and political scientists working in this realm, it suggests that cold reasoning (rational, unemotional) is very different from hot reasoning (emotional, motivated).
    Consider an example. You can easily correct a wrong belief when the belief is that Mother’s Day is May 8, but it’s actually May 9. Nobody is going to dispute that—nobody’s invested enough to do so (we hope), and moreover, you’d expect most of us to have strong motivations (which psychologists sometimes call accuracy motivations ) to get the date of Mother’s Day right, rather than defensive motivations that might lead us to get it wrong. By the same token, in a quintessential example of “cold” and “System 2” reasoning, liberals and conservatives can both solve the same math problem and agree on the answer (again, we hope).
    But when good arguments threaten our core belief systems, something very different happens. The whole process gets shunted into a different category. In the latter case, these arguments are likely to automatically provoke a negative subconscious and emotional reaction. Most of us will then come up with a reason to reject them—or, even in the absence of a reason, refuse to change our minds.

    Even scientists—supposedly the most rational and dispassionate among us and the purveyors of the most objective brand of knowledge—are susceptible to motivated reasoning. When they grow deeply committed to a view, they sometimes cling to it tenaciously and refuse to let go, ignoring or selectively reading the counterevidence. Every scientist can tell you about a completely intransigent colleague, who has clung to the same pet theory for decades.
    However, what’s unique about science is that it has its origins in a world-changing attempt to weed out and control our lapses of objectivity—what the great 17th-century theorist of scientific method, Francis Bacon, dubbed the “idols of the mind.” That attempt is known as the Scientific Revolution, and revolutionary it was. Gradually, it engineered a series of processes to put checks on human biases, so that even if individual researchers are prone to fall in love with their own theories, peer review and the skepticism of one’s colleagues ensure that, eventually, the best ideas emerge. In fact, it is precisely because different scientists have different motivations and commitments—including the incentive to refute and unseat the views of their rivals, and thus garner fame and renown for themselves—that the process is supposed to work, among scientists, over the long term.
    Thus when it comes to science, it’s not just the famous method that counts, but the norms shared by individuals who are part of the community. In science, it is seen as a virtue to hold your views tentatively, rather than with certainty, and to express them with the requisite caveats and without emotion. It is also seen as admirable to change your mind, based upon the weight of new evidence.
    By contrast, for people who have authoritarian personalities or dispositions—predominantly political conservatives, and especially religious ones—seeming uncertain or indecisive may be seen as a sign of weakness.
    If even scientists are susceptible to bias, you can imagine how ordinary people fare. When it comes to the dissemination of science—or contested facts in general—across a nonscientific populace, a very different process is often occurring than the scientific one. A vast number of individuals, with widely varying motivations, are responding to the conclusions that science, allegedly, has reached. Or so they’ve heard.
    They’ve heard through a