Meghan McCain

"We must accept each other and the different opinions within the party instead of trying to cannibalize people that diverge from an arbitrary purity test. I refuse to let the extremists win."

I really admire her for saying this.

HA!

I just realized that my statement from this post, about people taking things at some sort of hybrid gist and gestalt value, assigning emotional responses, and then going from there without analyzing it too deeply, mirrors greatly with the primary research subject of one of my predecessors. I am most definitely my teacher's student.

Dr. Valerie Reyna ran the cognitive psychology judgment and decision making lab in which I participated as a researcher for a year and a half. I was exposed quite a lot to her and her husband Dr. Charles Brainerd's Fuzzy-Trace theory. It's a dual-trace theory that seems to explain why people pick intuition above deductive logic, published in 1990.

There are tried and true cognitive tests which show over and over again how often most people will make faulty decisions without the use of corrective probability and logic to guide them. The Monty Hall problem is a perfect example, fooling even some of the most astute minds who not only give the standard answer but will argue the point, even after being told the mathematically correct answer, until they are blue in the face.

The only thing I've really added is perhaps clarifying the semantic component of the Fuzzy-Trace theory.