If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You’ll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.

In his book The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about how group communal brains work: If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others … you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the so

A common theme in many wisdom traditions encourages us to see things from many viewpoints and avoid the illusions that come from looking only through our own eyes. Buddhist practice can take this to extremes, adopting the perspectives not only of other people but also of animals, plants or physical objects, breaking down the distinction between us

Psychologists have a name for our tendency to confuse our own perspective with something more universal: it’s called “naive realism,” the sense that we are seeing reality as it truly is, without filters or errors.[9] Naive realism can lead us badly astray when we confuse our personal perspective on the world with some universal truth.