When you put forth a reasonable argument to someone, you’re pretty much assuming they are going to care about reason, and assign some authority to it, submitting themselves to its authority. Frequently, though, we get responses that don’t fall in line with that assumption. And what do we do? We get frustrated, of course. But more than that, look how often we continue to expect people to yield to reason!
There’s a thing called Consensus Bias, by which we unrealistically expect more people to agree with us than will agree. And there’s also a Reasonability Bias (my term), by which we unrealistically expect more people to be more reasonable than they are going to be. This Reasonability Bias has had another name among economists for a long time. They call it the Standard Economic Model. It’s the assumption that goes something like this: People will generally act rationally/reasonably, in their own best interests.
This is the bias upon which the US Constitution was dependent—that if things weren’t working out, the voters would step in and act rationally in their own best interests. But History shows us, and Cognitive Science agrees, that the citizens of the United States have not generally acted rationally in their own best interests, and are quite infamous for re-electing tyrants and scoundrels and oath-breakers to office.
So it seems to me that what’s at stake here is that so many of us have a strong bent toward how we want to see the world. We want others to be rational/reasonable, and we resist any sort of general admission that they are not acting that way. So we continue to make (hopefully!) rational/reasonable arguments in an attempt to sway them to better decisions and behaviors, yet this fails quite often—and more often than we would care to admit.
Thomas Paine seems to have been at least temporarily free from this Reasonability Bias when he wrote:
“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
Yet so many of us continue on and on, trying to convince the unconvinceable, as if all that’s needed is just another diligent try at it. And it seems to me that we’re afraid to call it what it is. We’re afraid to make the diagnosis that such a person is habitually irrational, and disinterested in reason as a regular way of life. And perhaps we get fooled from time to time when such people do make use of reasonable arguments on a subject where truth and rationality do not threaten them. Perhaps we put too much stock in anecdotal evidence, without stopping to work out some statistics on just how often they act or answer irrationally. And perhaps, sometimes, this is because we don’t want to know. Perhaps it’s because we would not like a world in which irrationality were rampant, and so we pout at the idea that that’s what our world is like, and we refuse to admit the obvious.
