On 4/1/2026 at 11:11 PM, iNow said:

I challenge the premise and posit that it evolved long before humans ever entered the scene

Where do you place the starting gun, then?

I'm thinking now that I may have misunderstood what the words 'motivated reasoning' mean in psychology. If I understand correctly, it's about emotional bias.

From https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/motivated-reasoning:

Motivated reasoning is defined as the process by which individuals distort incoming information to align with their prior beliefs, often driven by a conflict between the motivation for accuracy and the desire to reach preferred conclusions. This phenomenon involves specific neural mechanisms that reflect biases in judgment and perception based on personal or partisan interests.

2 hours ago, dimreepr said:

Squirrels often fake burying their nuts, just in case their being spied on, if they turned that tool on themselves, they'd never bury a nut.

A reverse ferret?

39 minutes ago, joigus said:

Where do you place the starting gun, then?

I'm thinking now that I may have misunderstood what the words 'motivated reasoning' mean in psychology. If I understand correctly, it's about emotional bias.

From https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/motivated-reasoning:

I didn't know it was somebody's specialist technical term, so thank you. +1

3 hours ago, joigus said:

Where do you place the starting gun, then?

At the very least with other great apes, but far more likely it’s sooner with other primates and maybe even mammals and potentially sooner.

Where the exact starting point is less relevant IMO than the idea that it almost certainly didn’t start with humanity.

2 hours ago, studiot said:

I didn't know it was somebody's specialist technical term, so thank you. +1

Thank you. I hope people who know more about this than you or me can illuminate the nuances.

I must say I tend to see much that's going on among humans (in evolutionary terms) as a product of the needs of small clans having to struggle for survival 50'000 years from now until the present.

10 minutes ago, iNow said:

At the very least with other great apes, but far more likely it’s sooner with other primates and maybe even mammals and potentially sooner.

Where the exact starting point is less relevant IMO than the idea that it almost certainly didn’t start with humanity.

Agreed. Cephalopods and corvids come to mind too for relatively complex congnitive features.

Sea mammals and great apes immediately spring to mind, of course. I also find difficult to believe that dinausaurs didn't develop fairly complex cognitive abilites, given that they we here for more than 200 million years.

16 hours ago, joigus said:

Agreed. Cephalopods and corvids come to mind too for relatively complex congnitive features.

Sea mammals and great apes immediately spring to mind, of course. I also find difficult to believe that dinausaurs didn't develop fairly complex cognitive abilites, given that they we here for more than 200 million years.

I think pack hunters of some sort would be a leading contender, to develope motivated reasoning of some sort.

21 hours ago, geordief said:

A reverse ferret?

No (have I missed the joke, again?).

Edited 7 hours ago7 hr by dimreepr

30 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

I think pack hunters of some sort would be a leading contender, to develope motivated reasoning of some sort.

I still would like to know whether @Otto Kretschmer means 'motivated reasoning' in a sense that specifically can be phrased as,

motivated reasoning broadly refers to the phenomenon where people “arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at when accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs.

As defined in https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/motivated-reasoning

54 minutes ago, joigus said:

I still would like to know whether @Otto Kretschmer means 'motivated reasoning' in a sense that specifically can be phrased as,

As defined in https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/motivated-reasoning

Yep. That's broadly what I meant.

9 minutes ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Yep. That's broadly what I meant.

So why not in politics?

52 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

So why not in politics?

This is a cognitive phenomenon, not solely a political one. Humans use this hearistic when reasoning about many different things.

Edited 4 hours ago4 hr by Otto Kretschmer

Would "motivated reasoning" apply to a mouse that thinks it can get a drink from a bucket of water but ends up drowning because it can't get back out or any other creature misjudging a given scenario?

Deleted 🫣

Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by geordief

I think we tend to overestimate the immediate evolutionary value of high-level reasoning and data gathering that we see today in sophisticated science, at least for the individual and the close kin. I doubt individuals or clans tens, hundreds or even millions of years ago did anything much in the way of, eg, considering counter-arguments to a given argument. The most important thing was probably to act quickly in a way that's not obviously contrary to survival conditions, and has worked within reasonable limits.

And now that I think of it, @exchemist has very much answered to this in a way I would subscribe to.

So sorry I initially misunderstood the premises.

Edited 3 hours ago3 hr by joigus
minor correction

No doubt the small hunter-gatherer bands of most of our evolutionary history benefited when people could align their beliefs with the others, thus promoting group cohesion. For small groups, such cohesion would be important to survival. The ability to do science, with careful data collection and analysis and high-order abstract reasoning is more what SJ Gould called a spandrel. We later learned to put that spandrel of extending certain cognitive skills to a useful purpose when we entered the complexity of larger communities and divisions of labor and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)