A useful article. No doubt Politically Incorrect, but then real-world empiricism so often is, because PC babble is intellectually incoherent. We are in reality feeble-minded apes and our brains are not adapted for our complex modern world. Thus our brains automatically reach for the "nearest-fit" approach, which is very often quite wrong.

An excellent example of this was the study in which volunteers were asked to come to a building and go up to the 3rd floor in order to participate in a psychology experiment. Each volunteer was scheduled for a different time, so they never overlapped. As the volunteer stepped into the elevator to ride up to the 3rd floor they encountered a second person who was holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a jumble of books & papers in the other. This second person asked the volunteer to hold their coffee for a moment so they could arrange the books & papers.

Later, the volunteer was asked a series of questions among which was "How do you rate the personality of the person you met in the elevator on your way here?" The options were: Warm, Neutral, Cold.

Overwhelmingly, if volunteers had been handed a warm cup of coffee they rated the personality as Warm. Conversely, holding a cold cup of coffee resulting in a rating of Cold. Each volunteer had "reasons" for their rating including "I'm an excellent judge of character" and "you could just tell they were a nice person." None were aware of the real impetus for their ranking.

In short, we are generally oblivious to the reasons we do things but we hate to acknowledge this simple fact.