No, I was commenting on statement, "everyone does this". What I was trying to say is that with effort, you can begin to identify times when you are biased toward a certain thing (in this case, different programming styles), and consciously choose to leave your emotions out of the equation.
Okay. Sorry, I'm used to reddit were everything is a veiled accusation.
Yeah, you can train yourself, but everyone does it nonetheless. Everyone does it by default, and I don't think it's reasonable to claim that anyone has completely or effectively rid themselves of motivated reasoning.
I try to do this as much as possible, though. It usually ends up with me just having no opinions, rather than an "unbiased" one.
Though I'm not sure how effective training yourself in this way is. There have been studies that show it's difficult to induce this in people, but that statistical, of course. Some people likely take to it much better than others - some people may even take to it very well. I like to think I've had some success, but, you know, that might be motivated, so I don't really have a strong opinion.
Are you implying I prefer functional programming? I don't. I don't have a horse in this race.