Can humans truly reason? We explore this key question by changing the context of abstract philosophical thought experiments to partisan hot-button political issues. We observe a LARGE drop in performance, but also an increase in variance, making humans increasingly unreliable.
This begs the question: Do humans truly understand rational decision-making? Introducing #Party_Switch! We reversed the position of a political party on two major and salient issues. Check what happens next! Human political opinions changed immediately and substantially when their party switched its policy position – even when the new position went against humans previously held views. While it'll be interesting to see how AI models perform in similar tests, we doubt the drop-off would be as severe.
Can scaling human IQ and better education solve this? We find that smarter humans tend to perform significantly better on abstract thought experiments, but only become more sophisticated at self-deception and hallucinating seemingly plausible but flawed arguments when dealing with real-world political issues.
Overall, we found no evidence for independent reasoning in humans. Human behavior is better explained by sophisticated groupthink - so fragile, in fact, that changing the names of political parties can alter policy evaluations by ~10%!
This begs the question: Do humans truly understand rational decision-making? Introducing #Party_Switch! We reversed the position of a political party on two major and salient issues. Check what happens next! Human political opinions changed immediately and substantially when their party switched its policy position – even when the new position went against humans previously held views. While it'll be interesting to see how AI models perform in similar tests, we doubt the drop-off would be as severe.
Can scaling human IQ and better education solve this? We find that smarter humans tend to perform significantly better on abstract thought experiments, but only become more sophisticated at self-deception and hallucinating seemingly plausible but flawed arguments when dealing with real-world political issues.
Overall, we found no evidence for independent reasoning in humans. Human behavior is better explained by sophisticated groupthink - so fragile, in fact, that changing the names of political parties can alter policy evaluations by ~10%!