"I want to believe"

This thesis investigates how goals and needs that people have influence cognitive processes and their outcomes. What we want in life influences reasoning much more than is perhaps currently appreciated. Chapter 2 shows that stable motivational tendencies influence effectiveness in certain reasoning processes. Chapter 3 demonstrates how people who feel disempowered in society can project their disempowerment onto mass shooters, ostensibly because they take revenge on what they view as an unfair society. Chapter 4 shows how opinions on safety guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic became polarized. Essentially, thinking really hard can actually lead different people to arrive at very different outcomes. This calls into question the idea that thinking more effortfully should lead to better and more accurate outcomes. The bottom line is that – more than actually knowing what is right - people want to feel like they know what is right. Because humans seem to value consistency higher than actual accuracy, we want to believe things - and keep believing them.

Dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/13cb8765-34a5-4b10-9cc3-9012a56eeec5