Intuition takes precedence over rational thought from "summary" of The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
In the moral domain, intuitions come first and reasoning is usually just a post-hoc construction made up on the fly, crafted to serve social, emotional, or moral ends. This means that the way moral judgments are made is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth. We are adept at reaching conclusions that have moralistic overtones, like whether it's better to throw a switch that will kill one person in order to save five, or whether it's acceptable for a brother and sister to have safe sex. When asked to justify these judgments with reasons, people can do so easily, even though the reasons they give have nothing to do with the factors that actually determined their judgments. Many psychologists now agree that reasoning is generally biased in favor of the conclusions people want to reach. This is called "motivated reasoning." It is found whenever people have strong feelings about an issue, whether those feelings are based on reason or intuition. In fact, people who are not emotional about a topic cannot reason well about it. They can't weigh the evidence impartially. If intuition comes first and reasoning is generally a servant of intuition, then why does reasoning exist at all? The answer is going to surprise some people, because the social intuitionist model imp...
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