Author Archives: Jason Weeden

You’ll often hear people, including people on this blog, talk about self-deception as a central factor in creating bias.  Work from cognitive neuroscience, however, shows that the "self-deception" description doesn’t really capture how deep the issue runs.  In this post, I’ll give an analogy that a number of us use these days to describe our understanding of the cognitive architecture of conscious speech.  The earliest I can remember using the analogy was in a paper I wrote in the mid/late 90s, and the model behind it drives some of my comments over at Chatty Apes.  Jon Haidt gives the analogy in an interview here.  Rob Kurzban has a superb new article on it here.  Below, I provide the analogy.

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