... of The Political Brain. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
"The implications of the findings reach far beyond politics. A jury assessing evidence against a defendant, a CEO evaluating information about a company or a scientist weighing data in favor of a theory will undergo the same cognitive process. "
The problem with this piece is the assumption - not the implication - that the findings reach beyond politics. A jury weighing evidence was not tested and a jury weighing evidence is engaged in something more than a tad different from deciding who to vote for. The people tested had already made up their minds regarding the candidates. The jury has not made up its mind - or at least this article provides no evidence for that.
Further studies of this nature might provide evidence that we are naturally essentialists, and given to deductive rather than inductive reasoning. That is why it is so important to bring the imagination to bear on the problems of reasoning, because it is imagination that lets us try out fresh patterns on the data.
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