Episode 15 of de Ongekend podcast. Kevin Dorst has amazing theories on the rationality of human thinking.
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Timeline
03:30 – You just believe that because…: people from different environments with different upbringings predictably develop different political beliefs
7:30 – There’s something problematic about the fact that you could’ve believe differently than you do now so easily (if I would have been born 100km to the north-east I probably would believe in God right now)
12:00 – Why the fact that your beliefs will predictably move in a certain direction is often a sign you’re being irrational
16:00 – How ambigious evidence explains polarization
26:00 – Why confirmation bias is rational
30:00 – What really drives confirmation bias
38:00 – Is it rational to be more critical of uncongenial evidence?
44:00 – Recent studies (e.g. Anglin 2019) show polarization and belief perseverance to be rarer than previously thought
48:00 – Standard normative models of rational belief and action are wrong about how rational people would think and act
Shownotes
- Kevin Dorst: website, twitter
- Maarten van Doorn: RU page, website, substack, twitter
- Kevin’s blog series on rational polarization.
- Here’s his 2021 academic paper.
- Dorst (2020) – Confirmation Bias Is Rational
- Anglin, S. M. (2019). Do beliefs yield to evidence? Examining belief perseverance vs. Change in response to congruent empirical findings. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 82, 176–199. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.02.004