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The dissertation explores the impact of motivated reasoning, a tendency for reasoning to proceed with the goal of construing evidence in ways that are supportive of a desired conclusion, for normative discussions in the epistemology of disagreement and political philosophy. The introduction provides a brief overview of the psychology of motivated reasoning and its consequences. One of these is belief polarization, a tendency for the beliefs of people who initially disagree to move toward the extremes after the persons view the same body of evidence. Another is that deliberation in groups with internal disagreement is an effective means of epistemic improvement. The introduction also provides overviews of the epistemology of disagreement and the role of disagreement for political legitimacy, and details the contributions of the four articles to these debates.Article 1 responds to arguments for the conclusion that belief polarization is a rational phenomenon. It argues that, when disagreement is salient, the biased processing of evidence that results in belief polarization is incompatible with rationality, and the resulting polarized beliefs are neither reliably formed nor supported by the evidence, properly construed. Article 2 discusses the epistemic significance of political disagreement. It shows that motivated reasoning about politically salient propositions implies that a political opposite's familiarity with relevant evidence and their intellectual virtues are inversely correlated with their perceived probability of being right, conditional on disagreement. This presents us with a puzzle in determining how significant such disagreements are, one that cannot be escaped by denying that political disagreements in general are epistemically significant. Article 3 discusses the impact of the beneficial effects of collective deliberation in groups with internal disagreement for the epistemic significance of discovered disagreement. It argues that these benefits can provide one with epistemic reason to maintain confidence in the face of discovered disagreement when doing so promotes epistemically fruitful deliberation. Article 4 discusses the impact of motivated reasoning in defense of our political or cultural values for the legitimacy of democratic decision-making. It addresses the extent to which democratic authorities should be responsive to mistaken factual beliefs in the public when these beliefs are the result of motivated reasoning in defense of controversial doctrines, and whetherfactual beliefs, even when supported by our best science, are excluded from public reason if they are entangled in a cultural dispute.

AbstractAre people more likely to (mis)interpret information so that it aligns with their ideological identity when relying on feelings compared to when engaging in analytical thinking? Or is it the other way around: Does deliberation increase the propensity to (mis)interpret information to confirm existing political views? In a behavioral experiment, participants (n = 1207, Swedish sample) assessed numerical information concerning the effects of gender quotas and immigration either under time pressure or under no time pressure. To measure trait differences in cognitive sophistication, we also collected data on numeric ability. We found clear evidence of motivated reasoning when assessing both the effects of gender quotas on companies' financial results and the effect of refugee intake on crime rates. Subjects who prioritized equality over liberty on the labor market were 13 percentage points less likely to correctly assess numerical information depicting that companies that used gender quotas when hiring made less profit. Subjects who classified themselves as 'Swedes' rather than 'World citizens' were 14 percentage points less likely to correctly assess numerical information depicting that crime rates decreased following immigration. Time pressure did not affect the likelihood to engage in motivated reasoning, while subjects with higher numeric ability were less likely to engage in motivated reasoning when analyzing information concerning refugee intake, but more likely to engage in motivated reasoning when analyzing information regarding the effect of gender quotas. Together these results indicate that motivated reasoning is primarily driven by individual differences in analytical thinking at the trait level and not by situational factors such as time pressure, and that whether motivated reasoning is primarily driven by analysis or feelings depends on the topic at hand.

Does motivated reasoning harm democratic accountability? Substantial evidence from political behavior research indicates that voters have "directional motives" beyond accuracy, which is often taken as evidence that they are ill equipped to hold politicians accountable. We develop a model of electoral accountability with voters as motivated reasoners. Directional motives have two effects: (1) divergence—voters with different preferences hold different beliefs, and (2) desensitization—the relationship between incumbent performance and voter beliefs is weakened. While motivated reasoning does harm accountability, this is generally driven by desensitized voters rather than polarized partisans with politically motivated divergent beliefs. We also analyze the relationship between government performance and vote shares, showing that while motivated reasoning always weakens this relationship, we cannot infer that accountability is also harmed. Finally, we show that our model can be mapped to standard models in which voters are fully Bayesian but have different preferences or information.

"Motivated Reasoning and Political Decision Making" published on by Oxford University Press.

AbstractA large body of research in political science claims that the way in which democratic citizens think about politics is motivationally biased by partisanship. Numerous critics argue that the evidence for this claim is better explained by theories in which party allegiances influence political cognition without motivating citizens to embrace biased beliefs. This article has three aims. First, I clarify this criticism, explain why common responses to it are unsuccessful, and argue that to make progress on this debate we need a more developed theory of the connections between group attachments and motivated reasoning. Second, I develop such a theory. Drawing on research on coalitional psychology and the social functions of beliefs, I argue that partisanship unconsciously biases cognition by generating motivations to advocate for party interests, which transform individuals into partisan press secretaries. Finally, I argue that this theory offers a superior explanation of a wide range of relevant findings than purely non-motivational theories of political cognition.