Sublime

In psychology there are at least two biases that drive this pattern. One is confirmation bias:23 seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias:24 seeing what we want to see. These biases don’t just prevent us from applying our intelligence. They can actually contort our intelligence into a weapon against the truth.

Psychologist Arie Kruglanski has spent his career studying a phenomenon known as the Need for Closure: a desire of the mind to come to some definitive knowledge of an issue. Beyond exploring how individuals differ in that need, Kruglanski has demonstrated that we can manipulate it in order to be more attentive and engaged—and to make sure we comple

the mental inertia that John Stuart Mill called the ‘deep slumber of a decided opinion’.

Beyond exploring how individuals differ in that need, Kruglanski has demonstrated that we can manipulate it in order to be more attentive and engaged—and to make sure we complete the correction stage in our judgments.

professional perspective, I realized that I couldn’t restrict my search for evidence

“There is a bias in all opinion, even in opinion purged of desire,

Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed.

Indeed, unjustified extremism frequently results from a “crippled epistemology,” in which extremists react to a small subset of relevant information, coming mostly from one another.