Abstract
Commenting on Michael Patrick Lynch’s chapter, “Truth as a Democratic Value,” this chapter explores the obstacles to truth-seeking through the lenses of social and cognitive psychology. The comment begins by noting that dedicated truth-telling is not the standard mode of engagement for humans in our dealings with each other. We communicate in order to achieve a range of goals, with many of those exchanges consisting of untruths in various forms, and outright lies constituting only a small portion. Communication’s purpose is not to share truths but to gain desired benefits. As recipients, it is not only truthful evidence that persuades us. Also at work are emotion, intuition, group identity (tribalism), motivated reasoning, Haidt’s social intuitionist model of moral reasoning (judgment first, reasoning second), social proof, symbolic associations which evoke conditioned responses, Kahneman’s System 1 versus System 2 reasoning, and Cialdini’s “weapons of influence.” These phenomena, and others, make the value of the process of engaging each other truthfully, constructively, in democratic discourse all the more challenging. But examples are noted of social inventions that illustrate the possibility of finding reliable social-epistemic practices suitable for democratic engagement.
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