More kittens and puppies: on why social media discussions are a waste of time.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, in conversation with Krista Tippett:

And notice, in our conversation you are using the word “rational” much more often than I, because, in a way, you are — when people use the word “rational,” I think, what they mean by this is that there is a good reason for what you believe and what you do. If there is a good reason for it, you believe in what you do, then you are rational. But if we accept that in general, our more important beliefs are not rooted in arguments, that there is no good reason for why we have this religion or that religion or this politics or that politics; it’s just something that happened to us — that changes the nature. We shouldn’t be looking for rationality so much, because by using the word, we seem to expect it to happen. And I think that’s just not the way the mind works.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, I appreciate you pointing that out too, because actually, I also feel like the word “rational” carries a sense of judgment — that I would say what is rational, and somebody else would say what is rational. And I don’t actually know that it’s a word I use — I mean I think I would use the word “logical.” And one of the things I’ve been saying a lot to people in conversations in this last political year is, we’re not logical creatures. And being mad at the other side for not being logical is just not a good use of your rational brain. I don’t know. There I used the word again.

Mr. Kahneman: It is not, because you do not appear rational to them. And the fact that arguments that feel irrefutable come to our mind so easily doesn’t mean that those arguments are the real cause of our beliefs and doesn’t mean much of anything about the validity of the argument. The way that the mind works, very frequently, is that we start from a decision, or we start from a belief, and then the stories that explain it come to our mind. And the sequence that we have when we think about thinking, that arguments come first and conclusions come later, that sequence is often reversed. Conclusions come first, and rationalizations come later.

Ms. Tippett: But isn’t it interesting that the discipline — or, at least, the idealized discipline of politics or political science, the way we think you have a debate, and then, somehow, the best idea will appear right to everyone [laughs] — and that’s not, in fact, the way — as you’re saying, that’s not even the way our brains work.

Mr. Kahneman: Absolutely. I mean certainly, what is happening in the United States in the last six months is — it’s really a testimony to that sort of process. You have people on the left, probably — possibly the majority of the country, certainly the people that Donald Trump calls “elites” — and they cannot believe what they see in the polls every week, which is that behaviors that appear to them to be crazy have absolutely no effect on the popularity of the president among a group of his supporters. You read The New York Times, and you feel that everybody who writes there cannot make their peace with the fact that the support is stable, in spite of things that strike them as —

Ms. Tippett: Right, that’s what I mean — they’re always surprised by the same thing, over and over and over again, shocked.

Mr. Kahneman: Absolutely. “Why don’t they change their mind?” And the reason they don’t change their mind is that facts don’t matter, or they matter much less than people think. And people on both sides believe that there are facts that support them. But those beliefs should not be taken too seriously.

Ms. Tippett: I actually — I’m not over-oriented towards President Trump; I’m very oriented, though, towards the human dynamics that brought us to this political moment. And maybe this is just not a fruitful path to go down, but I wonder if you have thought about — how do you read the newspaper, and what do you do with — I doubt that you read the newspaper every morning and are continually surprised by this. So how do you think people who want to step back, who want to activate the deliberative part of their — of our capacity — do you have any very practical thoughts towards that?

Mr. Kahneman: Well, what is disappearing, or seems to be disappearing, is a culture of debates between diverse opinions. Whether there is anything that can be done about it, I would say there is something that can be done, but it’s — nothing deep can be done, I think. What can be done is superficial, can be very, very useful, so teaching statistics to the young would be useful, teaching economics to the young would be useful, teaching self-critical thinking, or better yet, how to criticize other people, because this is more pleasant and more interesting — those things can be done; you could educate intelligence analysts, you could educate people who feed information to decision makers, to some extent, to improve their product. But those are very marginal improvements. When it comes to the big issues, I’m not very optimistic.