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 51 minutes ago51 min 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