A Darwinian Look at Irrational Voting

By now most of us are convinced that people can’t think straight, particularly when voting. Countless studies in fields like cognitive science have established that we mislead ourselves through confirmation bias and so on. We are specialists at justifying irrationality. Look at all the votes that white women gave to Minority President Donald Trump, who boasted of sexually assaulting them. 

We understand that people often can’t think straight.

We also believe, as good Darwinians, that harmful traits cause organisms to fail to reproduce. The harmful traits get evolved out. Unless Darwin was wrong, irrational thinking must be a useful trait. 

In a New Yorker article on-line, Elizabeth Kolbert presented an argument made by cognitive scientists, who tell us that the abilities to deceive ourselves or jump to conclusions and so on evolved on the plains of Africa, where they worked to keep groups of people cooperating with one another. Hyper-cooperation is what made us great, and it depends on misleading ourselves into sharing food rather than eating it alone, which, as Ayn Rand correctly points out, would be in our individual best interest (except that then civilization would collapse).