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Intro -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Is Reasoning Useful? -- 2.1 Outreach Publications -- 2.1.1 Trends in Cognitive Sciences -- 2.1.2 Psychological Science in the Public Interest -- 2.2 Policymaking -- 2.2.1 The Credibility Problem -- 2.2.2 Behaviorally Informed Policies -- 2.3 Making Reasoning Relevant -- 2.3.1 A New Language -- 2.3.2 A New Toolbox -- References -- 3 What Is Special About Human Reasoning? -- 3.1 Protoreasoning Among Nonhuman Primates -- 3.1.1 Causality -- 3.1.2 Logic -- 3.1.3 Comparative Ontogeny -- 3.2 Our Uniquely Cooperative Mind -- 3.2.1 Coordination -- 3.2.2 Division of Labor -- 3.2.3 Cumulative Culture -- 3.3 Our Special Powers of Reasoning -- 3.3.1 More Than Social Context -- 3.3.2 More Than (One) Social Function -- References -- 4 Decisions -- 4.1 The Rationality Assumption -- 4.2 Rational Doers -- 4.2.1 The Naïve Utility Calculus Model -- 4.2.2 Reasoning About What People Do -- 4.3 Rational Talkers -- 4.3.1 The Rational Speech Act Model -- 4.3.2 Reasoning About What People Say -- 4.4 Do We Intuit Utility Maximization? -- 4.4.1 Intuitions About Doers -- 4.4.2 Intuitions About Talkers -- References -- 5 Morality -- 5.1 Moral Character and Its Components -- 5.2 Other-Regarding Preferences -- 5.2.1 Inferences from Behavior -- 5.2.2 Inferences from Processing -- 5.3 Doing Culture Right -- 5.3.1 The Impure and the Bizarre -- 5.3.2 From Conformity to Morality -- References -- 6 Delusions -- 6.1 Motivated Beliefs -- 6.1.1 Feeling and Doing Better -- 6.1.2 Cooperation-Motivated Beliefs -- 6.2 Self-Deluded Reasoning -- 6.2.1 Biased Evaluations -- 6.2.2 Conjuring Premises -- 6.3 Reasoning About Delusions -- 6.3.1 How Hard Should It Be to Detect Self-Deceivers? -- 6.3.2 What Counts as Detecting Self-Deceivers? -- References -- 7 Democracy -- 7.1 Reasoning About Issues

"Voter Information Processing and Political Decision Making" published on by Oxford University Press.

Political misperceptions can distort public debate and undermine people's ability to form meaningful opinions. Why do people often hold these false or unsupported beliefs, and why is it sometimes so difficult to convince them otherwise? We argue that political misperceptions are typically rooted in directionally motivated reasoning, which limits the effectiveness of corrective information about controversial issues and political figures. We discuss factors known to affect the prevalence of directionally motivated reasoning and assess strategies for accurately measuring misperceptions in surveys. Finally, we address the normative implications of misperceptions for democracy and suggest important topics for future research.

Despite being touted as a game-changing technology, studies on the influence of body-worn cameras (BWCs) on policing outcomes have produced mixed results, with the underlying reasons for such findings unclear. Drawing on the sociology of culture and organizational theory, we argue that BWCs often have mixed impacts due to deeply ingrained, valued occupational assumptions and practices shaped by the structural and organizational context. These assumptions and practices, collectively known as the police métier, are not politically neutral and can lead to motivated decisions rather than accurate ones. We suggest that such motivated reasoning can be mitigated by changing the structural or organizational context, such as establishing a citizen oversight agency (COA), which could decrease racial disparities in policing outcomes. To test these arguments, we examined the impact of BWCs on racial disparities in two types of policing outcomes: police homicides of citizens and disorderly conduct arrests (DCAs). Our findings indicate that while the adoption of BWCs does not impact racial disparities in DCAs or police homicides of citizens, there is a significant decrease in racial disparity in DCAs when BWCs and COAs are used in conjunction. Additionally, while the racial disparity in police homicides of Blacks and Whites does not decrease when BWCs and COAs are used together, there is an overall decrease in police homicides across both racial groups. Overall, our study demonstrates that technology's impact on bureaucratic performance is influenced by occupational assumptions and practices, which can be altered by external accountability mechanisms such as COAs.

"Referendums in the European Union" published on by Oxford University Press.

While official science has given its answer to the question on the origin of the Coronavirus (animal to human transmission), alternative theories on human creation of the virus – purposely or inadvertently – have flourished. Those alternative theories can be easily located among the family of conspiracy theories, as they always assume some secretive activity of some groups acting on their self-interest and against the good of the many. The article assesses the prevalence of these beliefs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, studies its development during the pandemic, and investigates its potential determinants. In particular, it analyses the relationship between beliefs in alternative theories on the origin of the virus and political orientation, by arguing that the association cannot be attributed to (politically) motivated reasoning, as the issue has not been highly politicized in the Italian context. Alternatively, the article suggests that the main factor driving beliefs in alternative accounts on the origins of the virus is institutional trust. Political orientation moderates its effects, depending on specific conditions (e.g. cue taking, position of the supported party either in government or opposition), and eventually reinforcing scepticism towards epistemic authorities for those with low trust in institutions. Data come from the ResPOnsE COVID-19 survey, carried out with daily samples from April to July 2020 (N > 15.000) to monitor the development of the Italian public opinion during the Coronavirus pandemic.

In social work, the methods for achieving policy goals are often subject to some degree of local and case-by-case autonomy. This autonomy enables the design of interventions to be negotiated between different actors, which are underpinned by diverse logics, interests, and knowledge-bases. This dissertation explores the reasoning behind social work intervention design. The study focused on how involved actors reason when they deliberate on which design to choose inindividual cases, including how different forms of knowledge and local organizational conditions affect the choice of design. The aim was to develop comprehensive knowledge about social work intervention design that is not limited to the influence of a single actor, knowledge form, decision-making model, or specific organizational condition. The study found that professional experiential knowledge and the local availability and range of intervention forms are the most significant factors shaping the design and customization of intervention. Furthermore, the study found that the local range of intervention forms is not based on professional analysis, but rather developed randomly and subject to managerial control. Client experiences can be significant if social workers assess their desires as credible and sustainable, or if clients are highly motivated or have had success in the past with the intended form of intervention. Several other factors of significance exist, but to a lesser degree or in a smaller proportion of the studied municipalities, such as financial constraints, the community interest of laypersons, and research findings. Regarding the use of research-based knowledge, there seems to be a decoupling between management and street-level. Social work managers described research-based knowledge,evidence-based practice, professional experiential knowledge, procurement, and legislation as the most significant factors of treatment deliberation.

Graphs play an important role in many areas of Computer Science. In particular, our work is motivated by model-driven software development and by graph databases. For this reason, it is very important to have the means to express and to reason about the properties that a given graph may satisfy. With this aim, in this paper we present a visual logic that allows us to describe graph properties, including navigational properties, i.e., properties about the paths in a graph. The logic is equipped with a deductive tableau method that we have proved to be sound and complete. ; This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Union (FEDER funds) under grant GRAMM (ref. TIN2017-86727-C2-1-R, TIN2017-86727-C2-2-R) and by the Basque Project GIU15/30, and grant UFI11/45. ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (author's final draft)

Political bots are social media algorithms that impersonate political actors and interact with other users, aiming to influence public opinion. This study investigates the ability to differentiate bots with partisan personas from humans on Twitter. Our online experiment ( N = 656) explores how various characteristics of the participants and of the stimulus profiles bias recognition accuracy. The analysis reveals asymmetrical partisan-motivated reasoning, in that conservative profiles appear to be more confusing and Republican participants perform less well in the recognition task. Moreover, Republican users are more likely to confuse conservative bots with humans, whereas Democratic users are more likely to confuse conservative human users with bots. We discuss implications for how partisan identities affect motivated reasoning and how political bots exacerbate political polarization.

Decades of research demonstrate that how the public thinks about a given issue is affected by how it is framed by the media. Typically, studies of framing vary how an issue is portrayed (often, by altering the text of written communication) and compare subsequent beliefs, attitudes, or preferences—taking a framing effect as evidence that a media frame (or frame in communication) instantiated a particular audience frame (or frame in thought). Less work, however, has attempted to measure frames in thought directly, which may illuminate cognitive mechanisms that underlie framing effects. In this vein, we describe a Web experiment (n = 400) in which US political partisans reported the extent to which a "global warming" or "climate change" frame brought to mind various climate-related concepts. Although the media frequently employ them interchangeably, these frames evoked distinct patterns of cognitive accessibility across partisans: Whereas conservatives associated heat-related impacts (rising temperatures, melting ice) more strongly with "global warming" than with "climate change," liberals associated these impacts equally with both phrases. Discussion focuses on implications for media framing of climate issues and framing theory more broadly.

AbstractAttempts to correct political misperceptions often fail. The dominant theoretical explanation for this failure comes from psychological research on motivated reasoning. We identify a novel source of motivated reasoning in response to corrective information: the justification of socially undesirable preferences. Further, we demonstrate that this motivation can, under certain conditions, overpower the motivation to maintain congruence. Our empirical test is a national survey experiment that asks participants to reconcile partisan motivations and the motivation to justify voting against a racial minority candidate. Consistent with our argument, racially prejudiced participants dismiss corrections when misinformation is essential to justify voting against a black candidate of their own party, but accept corrections about an otherwise identical candidate of the opposing party. These results provide new insight into the persistence of certain forms of political misinformation.