The Selective Laziness Of Reasoning

An attitude is someone's opinion or thoughts on a subject and subsequently how they feel overall about something. Behaviour is how someone acts or treats something. Given these two definitions we would expect that someone's attitude strongly influences their behaviour, and oftentimes this is true, however there is a distinct difference between how someone thinks they feel and what their behaviour reflects about their thoughts. The method of introspection or examining one's own thoughts can be unreliable as we tend to to explain away faults and are therefore biased to ourselves. People can be in denial or perhaps fear what society may think of their opinions; due to this they may believe their attitude is different to how it is oftentimes this

A study done entitled “The Selective Laziness of Reasoning” seems to suggest that people are more critical of other people's views than their own. When submitted with an argument they believed to be a different participants, and told to examine it critically over half of participants rejected the argument presented(Trouche, Johansson, Hall, & Mercier, 2015). The argument was in fact their own which they had submitted earlier. This is a rather startling result, suggesting that many people disagree merely to be contrary or in an act of rebellion against the perceived normal view. To put it simply people do not hold their own views to the same scrutiny they do others and will disagree with an opinion just because they believe it is not their own. This study does not tell us how people's attitudes influence behaviours but it does make astoundingly clear how fluid people's opinions are. And if they are so fluid then how reliably can they be used as an indicator of one's

This comes down to a number of factors including people being unable to accurately know their own mind, the subconscious playing a role in day to day life and the fact that behaviour can be very contextual and impossible to replicate on a questionnaire. In fact though debatable it is quite likely that we cannot accurately predict a person's behaviour short of actually placing them in a situation, however tests such as I.A.Ts can be good general predictors of behaviour. What this argument boils down to is that an attitude a person thinks they hold is not only rather simple to change but oftentimes it is not fully fleshed out and such is easily stripped away when it is applied to behaviour. The previously cited study “The Selective Laziness of Reasoning” is ample proof that an idea or attitude in our head seems to make a lot of sense to us but when put on a page in front of us we see its flaws and can pick it apart(Trouche 2015). What this tells us is that due to the inherent flaws and bias of our brain what we think we know or as it were what we think we think is often untrue and inapplicable in reality. Given all of the above it would appear to be obvious that attitude is an inaccurate and at times wholly unreliable behavioural