From Pine View Farm

The Wing Nut Way 2

Bloomberg’s Cass Sunstein explores the how wing nuts (and he applies this to both wings) think.

The short version is they think what they want to think because they want to think it.

Here’s a snippet:

For wing nuts and their many fellow travelers, there is a serious obstacle, and it goes by the name of “motivated reasoning.” When people have a strong emotional attachment to their initial convictions, they tend to heap ridicule on anything that runs counter to those convictions and to give a lot of weight to anything that supports them.

Motivated reasoning helps to account for two defining characteristics of wing nuts and their fellow travelers: a readiness to attack people’s good faith, rather than their actual arguments, and an eagerness to make the worst, rather than the best, of opposing positions.

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2 comments

  1. George Smith

    May 22, 2013 at 1:45 pm

    You do know this guy was one of the wing nuts’ main bete noirs a couple years ago. He was only slightly less hated and the object of conspiracy rants than “Saul Alinsky.”

     
  2. Frank

    May 22, 2013 at 2:04 pm

    Never heard of him, but that tells me he’s doing something correct.