The science of why we don’t believe in science

Excellent article on the latest research on how we form (and hang onto) beliefs even in the presence of overwhelming objective evidence that they are wrong:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call “affect”). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we’re aware of it