Smart people are usually better at finding the truth. But they’re also better at knowing which way the ideological winds are blowing, and thereby producing and accepting absurdities.

Interestingly, there is suggestive evidence indicating that education is negatively associated with one’s sense of power. That is, the more education someone has, the more likely they are to agree with statements like, “Even if I voice them, my views have little sway” and “My ideas and opinions are often ignored.” Granted, the correlation is quite ... See more

Results from a recent paper titled ‘Keeping Your Mouth Shut: Spiraling Self-Censorship in the United States’ by the political scientists James L. Gibson and Joseph L. Sutherland is consistent with the findings from Cato/Yougov. They find that self-censorship has skyrocketed. In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, 13.4 percent of Americans repo... See more

In his book The Social Leap , the evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel writes, “a substantial reason we evolved such large brains is to navigate our social world... A great deal of the value that exists in the social world is created by consensus rather than discovered in an objective sense... our cognitive machinery evolved to be only part... See more