Michael Huemer has written extensively on the topic of why people are irrational about politics [0]. I recommend this brief talk [1] which goes over some of the

Michael Huemer has written extensively on the topic of why people are irrational about politics [0]. I recommend this brief talk [1] which goes over some of the key ideas. Fundamentally, it's a problem of incentives: There is little or no incentive for people to be rational about their political beliefs, and there is frequently an incentive to be irrational about them. In particular: The theory of Rational Irrationality holds that people often choose—rationally—to adopt irrational beliefs because the costs of rational beliefs exceed their benefits. To understand this, one has to distinguish two senses of the word “rational”: Instrumental rationality (or “means-end rationality”) consists in choosing the correct means to attain one’s actual goals, given one’s actual beliefs. This is the kind of rationality that economists generally assume in explaining human behavior. Epistemic rationality consists, roughly, in forming beliefs in truth-conducive ways—accepting beliefs that are well-supported by evidence, avoiding logical fallacies, avoiding contradictions, revising one’s beliefs in the light of new evidence against them, and so on. This is the kind of rationality that books on logic and critical thinking aim to instill. The theory of Rational Irrationality holds that it is often instrumentally rational to be epistemically irrational. The theory of Rational Irrationality makes two main assumptions. First, individuals have non-epistemic belief preferences (otherwise known as “biases”). That is, there are certain things that people want to believe, for reasons independent of the truth of those propositions or of how well-supported they are by the evidence. Second, individuals can exercise some control over their beliefs. Given the first assumption, there is a “cost” to thinking rationally—namely, that one may not get to believe the things one wants to believe. Given the second assumption (and given that individuals are usually instrumentally rational), most people will accept this cost only if they receive greater benefits from thinking rationally. But since individuals receive almost none of the benefit from being epistemically rational about political issues, we can predict that people will often choose to be epistemically irrational about political issues. [0] http://www.owl232.net/papers/irrationality.htm http://www.owl232.net/papers/irrationality.htm [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JYL5VUe5NQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JYL5VUe5NQ