Why do facts and evidence so seldom sway people from deeply held ideas? It is because we have armament to prevent that from happening. Over the past decade, our pages have been filled with mentions of this problem. In this issue, David Robert Grimes takes a deep dive into the psychological concept that explains it: motivated reasoning—an inherently biased form of decision-making in which instead of evaluating evidence dispassionately, we interpret evidence only to affirm a preexisting belief. As he says, “It demands impossibly stringent standards for any evidence contrary to one’s beliefs, while accepting uncritically even the flimsiest evidence for any ideas that suit one’s needs.” While it has long been part of the human condition, we have seen the ills of motivated reasoning burst onto the public scene in recent years. It explains so much of the discord and disconnection from reality we witness in public discourse.

Grimes gets into his topic via Joseph Stalin and Trofim Lysenko in communist Russia. Lysenko captured Stalin’s favor by advocating pseudoscientific ideas about how to increase the yield of wheat crops. The view reinforced Marxist doctrine. Scientists with real knowledge of plants were suppressed, persecuted, and tortured; genetics became a taboo topic; the whole affair set back Soviet biology for decades. Lysenkoism has long been cited as a pernicious example of what can happen when a political regime embraces a pseudoscientific concept. Grimes reveals it as an equally egregious example of motivated reasoning gone wild. But it is not just for the pages of history. Opposition to climate science uses the same processes, and all manner of irrational beliefs today get accepted because they fit personal, religious, or ideological views. Yet, as Grimes notes, “Reality doesn’t care one iota for what we believe.” The question is: Do we care one iota about reality? We had better.

In her marvelous 2020 book and television series Cosmos: Possible Worlds, Ann Druyan devoted chapter (and episode) four to the tragic story of Nikolay Vavilov, the courageous scientist who was the primary target and victim of Lysenko’s pseudoscience. It is both an inspiring and heartbreaking story, one she told me she had long wanted to tell. I recommend her narrative to anyone wanting to learn more about the human cost of Lysenko’s nationalistic pseudoscience.

Melanie Trecek-King is a college biology teacher who came to the realization that teaching the processes of science and critical thinking is far more effective than focusing just on facts. In “Teach Skills, Not Facts,” she shows how she uses real-world issues relevant to students to help them evaluate claims. Likewise, Jeannie Banks Thomas, a folklorist and professor, discovered that even her own studies of legends and rumors didn’t make her immune to forwarding an online rumor. She proposes a “SLAP Test” to activate our BS detectors and “help us process the fire hose of misinformation that is today’s internet.”

Grimes, Trecek-King, and Thomas, like our other authors, are toilers in the fertile fields of human understanding and misunderstanding. They seek to recognize our irrationalities and find novel ways for us to overcome them to be better critical thinkers. More power to them.