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Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies?

A deep dive into four factors that prevent members of open societies from understanding political reality: complexity, invisibility, incentives, and politically motivated cognition.

I agreed to take part in the summer school because it would allow me to interact with a group of fantastic researchers and because it brings together two of my favourite things: (1) evolutionary social science and (2) the ideals of open, liberal societies—ideals that I regard as some of humanity’s most important and most fragile achievements. So understood, coalitions come in multiple sizes and varieties, ranging from small-scale, fleeting alliances organised around narrow goals—for example, the football teams people break into when kicking a ball around—to durable, large-scale communities such as sects, religions, nations, and political parties. Nationalists—those who treat their nation-state as a coalition they support and invest in—are notoriously biased in how they view reality, forming beliefs that paint their nation in an attractive light, exaggerate its virtues, deny or minimise its responsibility for crimes and wrongdoing, inflate its victim status, and so on.

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