The gist of the article is this. Public discourse in this country is now dominated by what the author calls “Motivated Thinking.” Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale University, says that motivated thinking occurs “when a person is conforming their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy.” An interest or goal, he says may be “remaining a well-regarded member of a political party (we might add or a church), or winning the next election, or even just winning an argument.” In these instances and many others, reasoning may well be carried on in a way that is independent of the facts of the matter in question.
The author of the article (Ezra Klein) gives a number of examples of the sort of thinking social scientists have in mind when they speak of Motivated Thinking. My favorite comes from professor Geoffrey Cohen of Stanford University. He showed a group of students two articles””one a generic news story and one that described a proposed welfare policy. The generic story was a decoy. Prof Cohen’s real interest was in reactions to the one describing welfare policy. He wanted to know if party affiliation influenced voters when they assess new policies. To find out he produced multiple versions of the welfare article. Some students read about programs that were generous and others programs that were anything but. Nevertheless, in some versions of these articles that described a generous policy he indicated support by Republican Party leaders; and in some of the ones containing meager programs he described them as having Democratic support. He found that if a liberal student’s party endorsed the meager program so did the liberal student, and if the conservative party leaders supported the more liberal proposal, so did the conservative students. In each case the goal serving to motivate and shape thinking was based not on an assessment of the policy proposals themselves but upon party loyalty and identification. On both the left and the right Prof. Cohen found that Motivated Thinking rather than assessment of the facts determined the outcome.
Thanks to Dr. Turner for another insightful look at what’s wrong with TEC. At the risk of appearing to indulge in the sort of “Motivated Thinking” that he rightly condemns for its indifference to accuracy or truth, I welcome his latest thoughtful contribution to the theological “debate” within Anglicanism, but regard his critique as understated and incomplete. As regular readers of T19 know all too well, I myself would be far harsher, especially on the Left. I put the word debate in scare quotation marks above since despite all the countless words that have been spoken, or hurled at one another, over the last decade in the Anglican Civil War, there has been very little that could be fairly described as honest debate, much less true respectful dialogue. Instead, there have been shouting matches, with unsupported assertions often drowning out those of us who attempted to make reasoned arguments. But in his attempt to be even-handed and fair, Dr. Turner seems to suggest that both sides are equally at fault about that substitution of mere assertions for careful arguments. Now blogs aren’t the best places to look for reasoned and nuanced arguments, but when you look at the major papers presented by the opposing sides at official forums where serious debagtes were supposed to be held, I think it’s fair to say that the Left, the “reappraisers” in Kendall’s diplomatic language, have been much, much worse about that than their conservative oppoents on the right.
Instead of resorting to the fields of pschology and political science for an illuminating angle on the quagmire, I suggest as an alternative turning to the field of the sociology of knowledge. Take Peter Berger, a virtual founder of the disciploine and a committed Christian (an orthodox but by no means always conservative Lutheran). Berger coined the phrase “plausibility structures” and showed us long ago (e.g., in his delightful book, [b]The Heretical Imperative[/b]) that we all tend to be oblivious to the socially-consturcted grids or lenses through which we view reality. When presented with facts that don’t fit our ingrained outlooks, we automatically tend to discount them as “implausible.”
The core problem, of course, is what another distinguished Christian academic, Robert George, professor of jurispudence at Princeton (and a commited, practicing Roman Catholic), has aptly called in a fine book, [b]The Clash of Orthodoxies[/b] i.e., two rival systems for understanding reality that are mutually exclusive, one being orthodox Christianity, and the other Liberalism, understood as an ism, namely, the ideology of thorough-going relativism (both theological and moral relativism).
What Turner bemaons as “Motivated Thinking” occurs when people decide what version of reality they embrace based on their pre-existing social commitments to the group they identify with, regardless of whatever evidence or arguments may be made to the contrary. Now it’s true that this uncritical way of thinking is found all along the theological spectrum for it’s a universal (if unpleasant) human trait, but in my experience it’s MUCH, MUCH worse among actitivists on the left. There is such a thing as an obscurantist Fundamentalism of the Left. and it’s far worse than the more obvious and notirous Fundmentalism of the Right.
David Handy+