Is your mind playing tricks on you without your awareness? Why do we cling to beliefs despite contradicting evidence?
In Subliminal, Leonard Mlodinow reveals how our unconscious mind shapes our judgments before conscious analysis begins. He explains motivated reasoning—our tendency to process information in ways that support existing beliefs—and offers practical strategies to overcome this natural bias.
Keep reading to discover how to avoid motivated reasoning and make more objective decisions in everyday life.
How to Avoid Motivated Reasoning
While we like to think of ourselves as rational decision-makers who carefully weigh the evidence before reaching conclusions, Mlodinow reveals that our unconscious mind plays a powerful role in shaping our judgments—often before our conscious mind even begins its analysis. Our unconscious rapidly evaluates options based on instinctive appraisals, emotional associations, and implicit memories, creating biases that influence our eventual decisions.
One of the most powerful ways our unconscious mind shapes decision-making is through what psychologists call “motivated reasoning”—our tendency to process information in ways that support our existing beliefs and desires. Mlodinow explains this tendency and provides advice on how to avoid motivated reasoning.
Like skilled lawyers arguing a case, our minds unconsciously seek out evidence that supports our preferred conclusions while discrediting contradictory information. This happens through several mechanisms:
- Adjusting Standards: We scrutinize evidence that challenges our beliefs more rigorously than evidence that supports them.
- Selective Attention: We give more weight to information that aligns with our desired conclusions.
- Biased Interpretation: We interpret ambiguous information in ways that fit our preferences.
- Gap-Filling: When information is missing, we invent explanations that align with our existing beliefs.
Mlodinow explains that it’s important to consciously counter your unconscious mind’s preference for motivated reasoning. To avoid motivated reasoning—combatting your mind’s tendency to favor information that confirms your existing beliefs—take the following actions:
- Actively seek out contradictory evidence.
- Consider alternative perspectives, especially from credible sources that challenge your views.
- Question your thought process and assumptions, particularly when evaluating issues that matter to you personally.
Why Our Brains Tend Toward Motivated Reasoning
This tendency toward motivated reasoning likely evolved as an adaptive mechanism—maintaining positive self-beliefs and confidence in our decisions would have helped our ancestors persist in challenging situations. However, in modern contexts, it can lead us to maintain biased views while believing we’re being completely objective.
| The Ancient Roots of Motivated Reasoning While Mlodinow offers practical strategies for countering motivated reasoning, the long history of this phenomenon helps explain why it’s so difficult to overcome. As philosopher Paul Thagard notes, thinkers have recognized this tendency for more than 2,000 years. Ziva Kunda’s groundbreaking research revealed why this habit is so persistent: Much of what we call “motivated reasoning” is actually “motivated inference”—unconscious, automatic, and emotionally driven rather than deliberate logical analysis. When Kunda watched her mother, a heavy smoker, dismiss evidence about smoking’s health risks by pointing to her tall, healthy sons, she realized this wasn’t conscious rationalization. Instead, her mother’s desire to believe smoking was safe was unconsciously shaping how she processed information at a fundamental level. This helps explain why this tendency has persisted throughout human history, and why overcoming it requires not just awareness but concrete strategies for examining our assumptions and actively seeking opposing views. |
Mlodinow provides an example. When reading about a controversial political issue, we might thoroughly fact-check articles that challenge our existing views while accepting supporting articles at face value, dismiss statistics that contradict our position as “flawed research” while treating favorable statistics as definitive proof, and fill in gaps in our understanding with assumptions that conveniently align with what we already believe.
| The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Case Study in Motivated Reasoning While Mlodinow describes how our unconscious mind processes information to support our existing beliefs, I Contain Multitudes author Ed Yong writes that the Covid-19 pandemic offers a real-world example of this process at work. Yong explains that Americans repeatedly fell into “intuition traps” that aligned with what they wanted to believe: that warm weather would kill the virus, that we could protect the economy without controlling the virus, that we could return to normal life through sheer force of will. These beliefs illustrate the mechanisms of motivated reasoning that Mlodinow describes. People who wanted to return to “normal life” scrutinized evidence supporting lockdowns more rigorously than evidence against them (adjusting standards) and focused on isolated examples of successful reopenings while ignoring broader trends (selective attention). Some people also interpreted ambiguous case numbers to support their preferred policies (biased interpretation) and filled gaps in understanding with assumptions that matched their desires (gap-filling). Perhaps most strikingly, these psychological processes operated at both individual and societal levels, creating what Yong calls “intuition death spirals” where communities collectively reinforced their preferred interpretations of reality, with devastating consequences for public health. |
