The Dark Side of Your Beliefs: When Rationality Fails
🔍 Key insights
Beliefs Are Often Driven by Loyalty, Not Logic – We like to think our beliefs are rational, but often they come from loyalty to people, identities, or groups rather than evidence.
Epistemic Partiality Shifts Our Standards – We subconsciously use different standards of evidence depending on who’s involved: we’re more forgiving (or skeptical) when it’s someone we care about.
Some Irrationality May Be Human... But Dangerous – A bit of irrational loyalty can make us more human — but it can also lead us to defend the indefensible or ignore hard truths.
📚 Go deeper
🎥 Related videos:
How Psychics Exploit Our Cognitive Biases by SciShow Psych – SciShow Psych. Uses fortune-telling tricks to reveal confirmation bias and belief perseverance in action.
Jonathan Haidt - Motivated Reasoning by Michael Wong – The moral-psychology scholar explains how reason acts as a “press secretary,” justifying gut intuitions instead of guiding them.
📖 Further reading:
Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things by Dan Ariely – Behavioral-economics tour of conspiracy thinking and identity-driven misbelief.
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson – Classic exploration of cognitive dissonance and the stories we spin to protect our self-image.
🎧 Podcast to listen to:
How motivated skepticism strengthens incorrect beliefs by You Are Not So Smart – David McRaney digs into the backfire effect and why debunking can entrench errors when beliefs are tied to identity.
💡 Think for Yourself
Which belief of yours would you be most afraid to find out is wrong… and why?
When was the last time you chose loyalty over truth — and would you do it again?
☁️ Thought Experiment
What if your best friend committed a crime — but you didn’t want to believe it? What would it take for you to finally accept the truth? And what would you do next?
Cheers,
Kevin