Intellectual Dishonesty: A Work of Art 2

Narcissists aren't the only intellectually dishonest people. It's just that their intellectual dishonesty readilly crosses the line into the bizzarre about ANYTHING and everything, because everything's always all about them = their ego. But most people have less-than-perfect integrity and will be intellectually dishonest about some things.

In a study by the Emory University Health Sciences Center, functional neuroimaging (fMRI) has been used to map what goes on in the brain of people deluding themselves. Staunch Democrats and Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they had to evaluate information threatening to their candidate, President Bush or Senator Kerry.

First, each partizan read a statement by their candidate. Then they read a statement clearly documenting a contradiction between those words of the candidate and his deeds, suggesting that the candidate was dishonest or pandering. Then they were asked to consider the discrepancy and rate the extent to which the candidate’s words and deeds contradicted each other.

Next, they were given a statement of exculpatory information that explained away the apparent contradiction. Now they were asked to reconsider the extent to which their candidate’s words and deeds were contradictory.

Then the process was repeated for the opposition’s candidate.

Intellectually honest people would have always found the candidate’s behavior highly contradictory at first and not contradictory in the end. But no one should be surprised that staunch Democrats and Republicans didn’t do that.

Need I say it? Staunch Republicans saw no contradiction in President Bush’s words and deeds, and no exculpatory information could make them unsee contradiction in Senator Kerry’s words and deeds. Staunch Democrats saw no contradiction in Senator Kerry’s words and deeds, and no exculpatory information could make them unsee contradiction in President Bush’s words and deeds.

You can see bizarre examples of this in almost every call-in session about some event just televised on C-SPAN. You won't believe your ears. It goes beyond unreasonableness. Many of these people have to be hallucinating, because they make you wonder if they were watching the same program!

What do the fMRI’s say was going on in the brains of the patrizans tested in the Emory study? Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory, who led the study, says:

We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning, What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.

Dr. Priya Saxena writes:

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions -- essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted -- not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward -- similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," says Westen. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

[…]

The investigators hypothesize that emotionally biased reasoning leads to the "stamping in" or reinforcement of a defensive belief, associating the participant's "revisionist" account of the data with positive emotion or relief and elimination of distress. "The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data," Westen says.

Now I’d like to see them run the same kind of test on three- or –four-year olds. Guess what? I bet the results would be the same. For, this is Magical Thinking, the way a child thinks before he or she reaches the Age of Reason. Truth is of no value to them. It’s all about their vulnerable little egos. If they need a friend, they’re perfectly happy with an imaginary one. They actually prefer fantasy to reality.

But normal children grow out of it.