Dual-Process Theory /// The Science of Falling for MAGA's Bullshit
Cognitive miserliness and lazy brains. A breakdown of Kahneman and Tversky's System 1 and System 2 thinking.
Man is a rational animal — so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it. - Bertrand Russell
Seventy-seven million Americans, my own mother included, pulled the lever to endorse Trump’s bullshit in 2024.1 And if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you have a MAGA in your family too. According to a TIME / Harris poll conducted just after the election half of Americans are estranged from at least one close relation, and one in five cite politics as the reason.2
As for Mom, I made the gut-wrenching decision to go “no contact” shortly after her second-favorite savior was anointed.3 I haven’t spoken to her since January 22, 2025, and don’t plan to until she expresses some modicum of remorse. My therapist sanctions the move, and he’s confirmed that I’m not the only one of his clientele losing nightly sleep over this nonsense. It’s maddening and terrifying to watch MAGA burn the world down — but it’s a real kick in the tender humanities to watch a loved one cheering on the whole affair.
So, how did we get here? Why have so many otherwise functional citizens been charmed by this pathologically lying carnival barker?
This newsletter is my attempt to dissect the forces that make truth optional for millions of sweaty, slogan-chanting Americans.
At the end of the day, we're a bunch of apes whose brains were optimized for defending ourselves and our tribes, not for doing unbiased evaluations of scientific evidence. - Julia Galef (The Scout Mindset, 2021)
We’re just dumb apes, it’s true. But at least some of us dummies have looked into the matter. And so we have science to help explain what’s gone wrong with us. We’re all guilty of these bugs to some degree, of course, and maybe understanding them will help us all behave a little nicer. Let’s start with the mother of all biases, good old-fashioned laziness:
1. Cognitive Miserliness (aka Dual-Process Theory)
Our ancestors survived by making snap judgments with minimal information. Hear a critter scurrying in a bush? No time to do a cost-benefit analysis or calculate the odds that it’s a squirrel… better assume it’s a lion and just run. In the hand-me-down circuitry of our brains we have two major modes of thinking, and they’re in a constant tug-of-war for dominance (hence, Dual-Process):
System 1 is swift, intuitive, and automatic. It’s what allows us to recognize a friend's face in a crowd, jerk the wheel away from a pothole, or gag at a curious hair in our salad.
System 2 is plodding, deliberate, and analytical. It requires conscious attention and mental work; it's at work when we calculate complex math problems, actively listen during a lecture, or weigh the pros and cons of a major life decision.
This distinction was famously explored by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman (and his oft-overlooked colleague Amos Tversky) beginning in the 1970s. Their work revealed that we rely heavily on System 1 during most of our day-to-day operations. And this makes sense. If you had to engage in meticulous analysis for every thought that arises (e.g. What color socks do I wear? Wouldn’t tooth vacuums be better than tooth brushes?) you’d hardly make it out the door.
We are, by default, reluctant to engage the mentally taxing System 2 unless absolutely necessary. We prefer easy, intuitive conclusions, so we skip the hard work of gathering evidence or examining nuance. In other words, System 1 doesn’t care much about truth or accuracy, and is happy to snub its nose at any elite, logical snobbery in the ivory tower of your brain.
Lazy as a Policy
So why else, aside from a desire to remain uneaten alive, are we so consistently stingy with our top-shelf thinking? Consider energy efficiency. The human brain is an energy drain, consuming roughly 20 percent of our body's calories while comprising only about 2 percent of our body weight.4 It makes sense, then, that natural selection would favor mental processes that conserve our hard-won metabolic resources — even if utter nonsense occasionally gets green-lit.
At first glance you might assume that System 2’s fancy executive logic would outgun System 1 when things get complicated (i.e. when System 2 tells System 1 to shut up, it’s thinking). Of course the ancient, error-prone portion of our lizard brain would step aside and let the adults in the room handle things, right? Not really. Try this: say aloud the color of each word below; red, orange, green or blue. Do not say the word itself, just name the color of the letters, and go as fast as you can:
This is the Stroop Effect. Try as you might, the uninvited sub-process of this task (reading) stymies your performance (saying a color). Ignoring direct orders, System 1 automatically reads the word, bungling System 2’s plan to follow the counterintuitive rules of the game. What’s extra-interesting about the Stroop Effect is that a literate, presumably educated process is the System 1 foil here. Even though it’s impatient and error-prone, System 1 can handle impressively advanced tasks — reading billboards, scrolling through Facebook, ignoring PBS, and so on. According to Kahneman:
The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps.5
The Stroop Effect reveals how System 1 and System 2 can get hopelessly gridlocked in their constant battle to keep you alive — all the while making you feel like you have two heads and ruining your performance on self-administered internet quizzes.6
Infected by Dumb Data
Here’s another one that cognitive scientists understandably call the anchoring effect. Imagine you’re asked if Gandhi was younger or older than age 9 at his death. Of course he was older than that, you might reason – adult Ben Kingsley played him. The anchoring effect predicts that your guess will be lower than if, say, age 107 had been thrown at you (instead of 9). The mere suggestion of a number causes one to anchor their estimates around that. Not only that, the anchor can be random, totally unrelated to the question posed, AND the subjects can know they’re being manipulated.
In one experiment, Kahneman and Tversky had subjects spin a numbered “wheel of fortune” rigged to always land on 10 for one group and 65 for the other. Then, as unrelated as it sounds, they asked subjects what percentage of UN member states were from Africa. It was obvious that the wheel added no meaningful information. But the anchor skewed guesses dramatically: Team 10’s average guess was 25%, and Team 65’s average guess was 45% (the answer at the time, in 1974, was 29.7%). Once again, System 1’s addiction to shortcuts (“heard a number, must be important”) overrides System 2’s sober, steady hand (“Let’s think rationally about countries in the UN, and definitely ignore that silly wheel thing.”). But, as Kahneman puts it:
It’s not surprising that people who are asked difficult questions clutch at straws, and the anchor is a plausible straw.7
It’s a powerful effect, holding fast even when subjects are rewarded with cash for being accurate. And to rub salt in the wound, we’re stubbornly righteous about our immunity to these malfunctions. According to Kahneman:
System 2 has no control over the effect and no knowledge of it. The participants that have been exposed to random or absurd anchors confidently deny that the obviously useless information could have influenced their estimate, and they are wrong.8
Kahneman, who spent his entire career doing this sort of thing, considered the anchoring effect “one of the most reliable and robust of experimental psychology.”
Parlor Tricks
So, what do these cognitive parlor tricks have to do with crowd size and satanic pizzeria dungeons? It could be that when a sensational headline or meme flashes before us, System 1 submits its final answer before System 2 even finishes reading the question. There’s neurophysiological evidence to back this up. EEG activity can be pretty neatly mapped onto the System 1 / System 2 framework. According to one study from 1997:
System 1 thinking is characterized by an increase in parietal alpha EEG power reflecting autonomic access to long-term memory and a release of attentional resources whereas System 2 thinking is characterized by an increase in frontal theta EEG power indicative of the engagement of cognitive control and working memory processes.9
With this in mind, scientists glued electrodes to subjects’ heads and asked them to spot fake headlines. It turns out bad performance — believing in bullshit — goes hand-in-hand with parietal alpha (System 1) EEG activity. This isn’t exactly a groundbreaking revelation. Of course people are more likely to be duped the less analytical thought they put toward the matter. But it at least suggests we’re on the right track, brain waves and all.
Then again, scientists are quite prone to bickering. They’ve thrown in the competing idea that our epidemic of bullshit can better be explained by “Motivated System 2 Reasoning,” aka MS2R. According to proponents, all those suckers that fall for bullshit aren’t really suckers at all. They come across some annoying fact that goes against their ideological grain and they put System 2 on the job. According to Dan Kahan (a present-day Yale professor, not to be confused with Daniel Kahneman), “Motivated reasoning refers to the tendency of people to conform assessments of information to some goal or end extrinsic to accuracy.”10 George Orwell wrote about pretty much the same thing nearly 80 years ago, just after World War II:
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.11
Aside from an indirect endorsement by the eerily prescient Orwell, there’s (a little bit of) evidence that backs up MS2R. One paper from Kahan and friends argues that a high level of reasoning capacity (and science literacy) in individuals is more tightly correlated to being polarized than it is to being correct, at least in the context of climate change.12 Another suggests that high-level reasoners can (and do) use their smarts to contort the truth, particularly when faced with an issue they’re passionate about, like gun control.13 I have my doubts, as Team Kahan strikes me as suspiciously apologetic to right wing causes.
The exquisitely named Gordon Pennycook wasn’t buying it either and poked some pretty convincing holes in these ideas. He and colleague David Rand decided to look directly at MAGA folks and their well-developed taste for bullshit. This was 2017 so they parsed people into Trump and Clinton supporters. They then ranked them based on their inclination to engage in analytical reasoning (Trump supporters were less inclined). Then he looked at their ability to detect bullshit.
If the believing-in-bullshit-requires-clever-mental-gymnanstics theory was right, there should be a positive correlation between being a natural reasoner and buying fake partisan bullshit. But there wasn’t. The takeaway, and subtitle of the article, aptly enough: Susceptibility to Partisan Fake News Is Better Explained by Lack of Reasoning Than by Motivated Reasoning14.
Turns out (at least some) MAGA followers aren't evil geniuses twisting logic to serve their agenda — they're just intellectually lazy. Which is somehow both less sinister and more depressing. I’ll let Orwell take it away - who similarly manages to be harrowing and comforting, with a bit of sage advice to boot:
The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. […] I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one’s own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them.15
https://www.cfr.org/article/2024-election-numbers | 77,284,118 | Council on Foreign Relations
Presumably Donald is an imperfect vessel for Jesus’ bidding, because God does slippery things like that.
Raichle ME, Gusnard DA. Appraising the brain's energy budget. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Aug 6;99(16):10237-9.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Fun pseudo-fact: The lore in cognitive science literature is that the Stroop test was used during the cold war to suss out Russian spies. Someone that speaks Russian, even if they tried to conceal it, would have trouble with a Russian-language version of the test. Their cover would be blown! Unfortunately, I fact-checked this and the first apparent mention of this was a 1987 account that confessed that the story was apocryphal :(
Kahneman, D. (2011).
Kahneman, D. (2011).
Williams, C. C., Kappen, M., Hassall, C. D., Wright, B., & Krigolson, O. E. (2019). Thinking theta and alpha: Mechanisms of intuitive and analytical reasoning. NeuroImage, 189, 574–580.
Kahan, D.M. Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection. Judgment and Decision Making. 2013;8(4):407-424.
Orwell, G. (1946, March 22). In front of your nose. Tribune.
Kahan, Dan M. and Peters, Ellen and Wittlin, Maggie and Slovic, Paul and Ouellette, Lisa Larrimore and Braman, Donald and Mandel, Gregory, The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks Nature Climate Change, Vol. 2, pp. 732-735, 2012.
Kahan, Dan M. and Peters, Ellen and Dawson, Erica and Slovic, Paul, Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government (September 3, 2013). Behavioural Public Policy, 1, 54-86, Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 307.
Pennycook, Gordon & Rand, David (2019). Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning, Cognition, Volume 188, 2019, Pages 39-50.
George Orwell, London Letter. Partisan Review (Winter, 1945)
** Russell, Bertrand. Unpopular Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950.
*** Galef, Julia. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. Portfolio/Penguin, 2021.