On a crisp May evening, as the sun was setting over the Pacific Ocean, dozens of scientists and entertainment notables gathered in Santa Monica, California for an event hosted by the National Academy of Sciences and the John Templeton Foundation. The event centered on a question posed by the evening’s speaker, University of California psychologist Peter Ditto: “What if many of us are far less rational than we believe?”  And if that’s true, particularly for ourselves, how can we meaningfully improve?

The event, titled Hot Cognition: Passion, Reason, & Reality, explored the phenomenon of motivated reasoning—the tendency to interpret facts in ways that support what we already want to believe. 

“We essentially confuse two feelings: the good feeling we get when we’re right, and the good feeling when things turn out the way we want them to,” said Ditto. That confusion, Ditto argued, is sapping the vitality of American life.

Social Divisions Run Deep

It is not a new problem: 

Ditto emphasized that motivated reasoning is not simply a failure of intelligence or education. It is rooted in something deeper: our instinct to form groups.

Social psychologists have long documented how quickly humans form in-groups and out-groups. In classic experiments, even arbitrary distinctions—assigned labels, colors, categories—are enough to produce loyalty, bias, and competition. The lines themselves can be almost absurd. What begins as a simple distinction can harden into identity, hierarchy, and conflict.

When Disagreement Becomes Moral

Social divisions become more volatile when they are infused with moral meaning. “When politics becomes moralized, people stop seeing the other side as misguided—and start seeing them as evil,” said Ditto.

At that point, disagreement no longer feels like a difference of opinion. It feels like a threat. Ditto explained that this is why arguments so often fail. When people feel morally attacked, they defend themselves and their beliefs more fiercely.

“Beliefs are like possessions. When you try to take them away from people, they resist,” said Ditto.

That resistance isn’t just stubbornness. It is psychological self-protection:

The Outrage Economy

If in-group thinking is ancient, today’s information environment has made it more powerful.

Princeton professor and neuroscientist Molly Crockett has shown that moral outrage is amplified online because it is socially rewarded—through attention, validation, and visibility. Anger travels quickly. Nuance does not.

At the same time, algorithm-driven media allows people to curate their own reality, reinforcing beliefs rather than challenging them. The result is not just disagreement, but distortion.

In a recent study, Ditto and his colleagues found that more than a third of Americans—37%—report having lost relationships with friends, family members, or partners due to political differences. People who experience these “political breakups” tend to become more hostile toward their opponents, more likely to see them as extreme, and more likely to attribute negative motives to them—reinforcing the very distortions that drove the conflict in the first place.

What Actually Helps

If motivated reasoning is deeply human, and even highly intelligent people are susceptible to it, can people meaningfully improve?

Ditto believes the answer is yes, though he is clear about the difficulty. He enumerated six approaches that could facilitate progress:

Proximity

One of the most effective interventions, he said, is meaningful human contact. “The more we hang around each other, the more we correct these exaggerated versions of who the other side is.”

Interaction matters. Shared experiences matter. Seeing another person as an individual, rather than as a category, matters.

Storytelling

Personal storytelling is surprisingly powerful. When people explain how their experiences shape their beliefs, it becomes easier to understand their perspective, “even if you don’t agree,” said Ditto.

Indeed, research has found that personal storytelling and perspective-taking can sometimes reduce defensiveness more effectively than facts or debate alone. One widely discussed field experiment on “deep canvassing” showed that even brief, nonjudgmental conversations encouraging people to reflect on their own experiences reduced prejudice months later. Personal stories may be most powerful not when they try to win an argument, but when they help people feel understood.

Affirmation and Understanding

“If somebody feels like their values are being affirmed, like they’re a good person, then they’re more likely to change their mind and see the value in other information, because you’ve bolstered their sense of self,” says Ditto. 

Stanford professor Geoffrey L. Cohen and UC Santa Barbara professor David K Sherman concur on the importance of affirmation: “People have a basic need to maintain the integrity of the self, a global sense of personal adequacy. Events that threaten self-integrity arouse stress and self-protective defenses that can hamper performance and growth.”

If you think about your own life, it’s perhaps not surprising that humiliation hardens people—and that dignity, respect, and understanding can soften defensiveness and make change feel possible.

Freedom

Human beings may long to belong, but they also want freedom—to think independently, resist oppression and coercion, and preserve a sense of individuality and autonomy.

Research on “psychological reactance,” first proposed by psychologist Jack Brehm, suggests that when people feel pressured, controlled, or told what to believe, they often double down instead. In some cases, persuasion can even backfire. We see it in children all the time (well, adults too) doing the exact opposite of what they’re told. 

Studies suggest people are more open to reconsidering their views when they feel they still have agency: when choices and alternatives are offered, when conversations are collaborative rather than coercive, when the messenger feels relatable, when multiple perspectives are welcomed, and when people feel respected rather than cornered.

Shared Goals

Ditto also explained the cooperative learning technique developed by social psychologist Elliot Aronson called the “Jigsaw Classroom“. 

 “You go into a classroom split between Latino kids and white kids, and then you develop these lessons where some kids have some of the information and some of the other kids have some of the information, but nobody has all the information to solve the problem, and so you have to work together across racial and ethnic lines to get to that point,” says Ditto. “The idea is that if you’ve got a goal you want to reach together, that creates ‘us’.”

Pausing

Another strategy is simple: slow down.

When confronted with information that provokes immediate outrage, people can pause and ask themselves whether they would react the same way if the roles were reversed. That moment of reflection can interrupt visceral responses.

Expanding the Circle of “Us”: Undivided, Un-Conquered

Ultimately, Ditto’s work points to a deeper question: how broadly are we willing to define “us”?

Will it take, as in so many sci-fi movies, a global enemy like the threat of aliens destroying planet Earth, forcing humanity to fight together, for people to finally realize that we’re more alike than different?

The human tendency to sort ourselves into in-groups and out-groups can be exploited by political actors, media systems, and our own cognitive biases. But it can also be redirected.

“I mean, that’s what the American experiment really is, right? It is this attempt to redefine who ‘us’ is,” says Ditto. It’s not about looking at the people who aren’t like you, who have different political beliefs than you, as somebody else, but they’re us. We’re all in this together.”

In an era shaped by ideological sorting, algorithmic outrage, and emotional manipulation, that may be one of the most important perspectives of all.

Alene Dawson is a Southern California-based journalist who writes about social science, culture, psychology, and well-being.  She is a regular contributor to the LA Times.