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Why do humans so frequently reason incorrectly?

1. Because they confuse reasoning with rhetoric.
2. Because their reasoning is most often constructed backward.
3. Because they continuously apply heuristics, or worse, dogmas.
4. Because they observe that their status alone suffices to impose a decision, thus dispensing them from reasoning.

What is rhetoric?

It is the art of gaining dominance in a verbal contest. We are particularly attached to it in public settings, because it corresponds to positioning oneself above the other in terms of social rank. In other words, in public, we generally do not seek so much to be right as to gain the upper hand.

What is backward reasoning?

In correct reasoning, we conduct an exhaustive analysis of the situation, which may eventually reveal a conclusion we discover.
In backward reasoning, we start from a conclusion chosen arbitrarily—because it aligns with our immediate interests or our beliefs—and then construct a biased reasoning a posteriori, consisting in selecting and articulating elements that justify this conclusion, to create the illusion of reasoning derived from analysis.

What is a heuristic?

A heuristic is a method that allows one to find a reasonably good solution to a complex problem with far less effort than would be required to discover the optimal solution.

For example, consider the traveling salesman problem. A traveling salesman must visit prospects in, say, 100 cities, and seeks the shortest possible route to accomplish this. Finding the actually shortest route is impossible for this salesman, who will thus resort to adopting heuristics to make it simpler.
A very simple heuristic might consist, for instance, of going from city to city by always choosing the nearest among the remaining ones. This is very easy to implement. However, it is far from optimal at the end of the journey.
Our traveling salesman might then apply a second heuristic, consisting of revisiting the last cities and deciding to visit them earlier, making the shortest possible detour at each step in the journey.

In our daily lives, we constantly apply heuristics. The problem is that the less competent we are in a given field, the more we apply simplistic heuristics there. In the end, our natural functioning leads us to easily find poor solutions.

The benefits of heuristics for the individual are twofold:
1. They allow us to spare the effort of reasoning, thus preserving our time and energy.
2. By using dogmas as heuristics, we generally improve our position in the game of alliances. Dogmas are often ineffective heuristics, or even completely erroneous—that is, leading to very poor solutions to the initial problem.

To explore further

Refer to the question 'What is a human?' which provides another perspective on the low quality of our reasoning.

Refer to Chapter 4 'The decision-making process, or the reign of the irrational' of the book From Capital to Reason.

↣ Wikipedia article regarding cognitive biases

↣ Wikipedia article concerning cognitive misery