Most of us tend to think that biased reasoning always leads us astray. But Katherine Puddifoot challenges this common-sense assumption and argues that motivated reasoning can lead us towards the truth.

Suppose you are considering your career choices. You decide you are going to be a world-leading research scientist. You believe that you are as likely to succeed as anyone else. You are also a young woman. Women are statistically underrepresented in higher level science, and you are aware of countless articles describing structural barriers faced by women in the sciences making it harder for them to reach the higher echelons of the profession. There isn’t anything about your skills or upbringing that gives you reason to think that you are less likely to face these barriers than other women. Nonetheless, because you want to believe that you are as likely to succeed as your male counterparts, you focus your attention on the successes of specific high profile woman scientists, and these successes allow you to believe what you want to.

Here you engage in what psychologists call motivated reasoning: believing what you do because you want to. You also believe this despite strong evidence to the contrary.

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But is it right to assume that this type of reasoning always, or always only, leads people astray?

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It would be easy to assume that this type of reasoning always leads people astray. There clearly can be risks to believing what you want to believe while ignoring statistics and well-researched articles. Frequently, when there is a poor fit between what we believe and the information that is available to us, our beliefs turn out to be false. Philosophers often describe people who make judgements that are a poor fit to the available information as irrational, and your belief about your likelihood of future success seems to be a prime example of what philosophers are talking about when they do so.   

But is it right to assume that this type of reasoning always, or always only, leads people astray? I would argue not.

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To do so is to ignore crucial features of situations in which people make judgements. In our imagined case, a girl (you) ignores statistical evidence and information about structural barriers when making a judgement. These features of the way that the judgement is made seem to indicate that her motivated reasoning will lead her astray. However, this isn’t the full story about what the girl believes. There are also consequences of the girl making the judgement she does. When we focus on these consequences, it becomes far less clear that the girl will be led astray by believing what she does, or, at least, that she will only be led astray. This is because there can be positive consequences associated with motivated believing even where it involves ignoring high quality information like statistics and research articles.

There are different types of positive consequence that could follow from believing that you are as likely to succeed as anyone else. This might make you feel better about yourself and your position in life, bolstering your self-esteem and wellbeing. These are important things. The belief might also encourage you to pursue your goal of being a scientist and make it more likely that you achieve the goal. As the saying goes, if you do not try, you will not succeed. In the absence of confidence in your success you might not try.