Paije Rush
Professor Zeugin
Workshop 100
December 8, 2011 “What Curves Our Thoughts?” How does Mooney intend to influence his audience /readers?

People are conditioned by a lifetime of learning. Chris Mooney, author of “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe in Science”, explores how difficult it would be for people to accept new information. When a person is confronted with facts that challenge a long-held belief, the result is a strong defense to their position, a process called “motivated-reasoning” in which people may instead be ‘rationalizing’. Rationalizing can help explain how, as a society; we can remain bias over issues for which there are loads of evidence and information. This article is important based on the various perspectives of the learning process such as the president vaccine wars, science on climate changes, and global warming issues. Mooney uses these perspectives to his advantage to persuade his audience on the independence of beliefs and how it affects our thoughts.
The theory behind “motivated reasoning” is that pre-existing beliefs, far more than any new facts brought to peoples’ attention tend to skew our thinking processes. These pre-existing thoughts color people’s most passionate and seemingly logical conclusions and beliefs. Mooney states, “‘Motivated-reasoning’ helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal.”(pg.2) Mooney takes the time to not only cite organizations, in which participants do not formally have political affiliations, but he uses experimental studies to demonstrate his point. For example, Mooney mentions the classic 1979 experiment in which “pro-and-anti-death advocates” were exposed to descriptions of two fake scientific studies. He discusses how one of the studies supported the experiment and one study undermined the notion that