COGNITIVE BIAS IN SOCIAL ARGUMENTATION MARK WEINSTEIN Montclair State University weinsteinm@mail.montclair.edu Abstract This paper looks at recent research indicating the deep connection between cognitive processes and information storage, retrieval and salience. Models of cognitive functioning challenge a simple resolution of the problem of belief entrenchment with particular relevance to social argumentation Introduction Arguments about social and political issues are notorious for being unpersuasive. Entrenchment of social and political postures is increasingly obvious as divisions on such issues are the basis for the new tribalism and other deep divisions within democratic societies, where political and social argumentation is both common and freely exercised (see Edsall, 2022a, for a comprehensive analysis). The unwillingness of people to alter their views on issues of social and political concern in the face of counter argument and contrary evidence has been generally construed as bias within the psychological literature. Early research was focused on the persistence of racial bias, and its resistance to evidence in support of prior beliefs (Ehrlich, 1973). More recent work has focused on social issues and economic issues (Lewandowsky et. al. 2012) offering possible insights into what Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman called ‘zombie ideas,’ ideas that ‘should have been killed by evidence but keep on lurching along’ (Krugman, 2020). Research in cognitive science offers insight into these phenomena, building upon a long-standing concern with problematic reasoning. The early literature focused on performance errors, reasoning that fails to meet normative standards from both formal and inductive logic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Research identified psychological mechanisms supporting such intergroup behaviors as stereotyping (Hamilton, 1981), with particular relevance to racial attitudes (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986). More recent efforts have offered processing accounts that offer structural analyses that offer insights not available from the earlier psychological literature (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000; Evans, 2008). Speculative accounts look further, indicating the deep connections between emotion and memory, information retrieval and resistance to refutation. We will eventually focus on the work of Damasio (2012) and Thagard & Aubie (2008), who drawing upon a rich basis in recent experimental work on the physiology of the brain and nervous system, offer comprehensive models of cognitive functioning that offer an account of cognitive processes that questions the possibility of a simple resolution of problems such as belief entrenchment. It is the thesis of this paper that such an understanding of cognitive processes offers both a challenge and an opportunity for argumentation theorists, pointing to the need for a deep analysis of underlying commitments, implicit and explicit warrants that determine how we construct and evaluate arguments. Why Cognitive science