Well, as someone who has taken a college level course in social psych, I can attest to much of what this article talks about. Taking that class plus personality gave me a real good picture of why people are the way they are; or at least some tools to hypothesize the reasons at any rate. Even before taking college level coursework in psychology I didn't bear much weight to the delusion that humans are 'perfectible' through reason.
Firstly, perfection lies in the eye of the beholder, and IMHO, perfection must contain flaw to be perfect (long story short). Secondly, is it really that shocking that we aren't all that rational? And does it really even matter if we aren't? Take one of my favorite quotes from one of the founders of social psychology:
Lewin
If an individual sits in a room trusting that the ceiling will not come down, should only his 'subjective probability' be taken into account for predicting behavior or should we also consider the 'objective probability' of the ceiling's coming down as determined by the engineers? To my mind, only the first has to be taken into account.
In other words, the fact that we aren't perfectly reasonable is not a problem. So long as we have a set of schemas or constructs around which to base our existence, we're just fine.
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