Comment by mustaphah
5 days ago
Haidt, in his great book "The Righteous Mind," has been arguing that reasoning evolved not to discover truth but to win arguments. There's a lot of scientific research backing his idea.
Haidt's metaphor is the rider and the elephant: the elephant (intuition) leans, and the rider (reasoning) invents the justification afterward and then defends it like a lawyer, not a truth-seeker.
Intelligence doesn't fix this - it just makes people better at coming up with hard-to-defeat arguments; that explains why smart people disagree all the time.
If you enjoyed TRM, his other book The Happiness Hypothesis surprisingly covers this and other concepts in much better detail relative to the OP.