Abstract This paper criticizes the epistemic foundations of democratic state-building, which are derived from a model political transitions according to liberal institutions will transform hitherto authoritarian and troubled country into more prosperous stable society and, therefore, foreign interventions establish these realistic worthy investments, provided they properly planned based on know...

This paper focuses on the effects of motivated biases on the way people reason and debate in everyday life. Unlike heuristics and cognitive (or 'cold') biases, motivated (or 'hot') biases are typically caused by the influence of a desire or an emotion on the cognitive processes involved in judgmental and inferential reasoning. In line with the ‘motivational’ account of irrationality, I argue th...

Probability judgments about logical propositions have raised substantial doubts about human rationality. Here we explore the idea that people’s probability judgments often may not refer to the relative frequency of a set, but instead to the probability of an explanatory logical pattern given the data. This idea has been formalized by Bayesian logic (BL), predicting a system of frequency-based l...