Do You Think We Are Stupid?

When she was in the second grade, my sister came home from school agitated. Apparently, her teacher tried to pull a fast one on the class.  But my sister had an advantage over most of her classmates.  She had two older brothers who had played on her gullibility so many times that she knew a fast line when she saw it.  At this point in her short life, she was wise to the ways of the world and nobody was going to trick her. The other sheep in the class may be naïve and believe everything that authority figures told them, but she was too smart for that.

Over family dinner that night, she announced, “My teacher tried to convince us that up in Alaska there are reindeer.  I told her that I don’t believe that nonsense. Santa Claus is not real, and neither are reindeer.”

It took my mother about 20 minutes to convince my sister that while in fact flying, domesticated reindeer with red noses are mythological creatures, non-airborne reindeer do in fact exist and thrive in Alaska.

Many years later I would read Jonathan Haidt’s landmark book The Righteous Mind and think of this dinner conversation. His book helped me understand the psychological research surrounding how we see our world and justify our moral reasoning. Haidt demonstrates that moral intuitions come to us first and then our minds find ways to logically justify those intuitions.[i]

This is a blog about the election deniers in my state. 

[i]. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 3-32.