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Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs? And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information? Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly. These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens. The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information. However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudesincreaseswhen more evidence is provided.

Motivated reasoning theory is a psychological theory that reads that policymakers interpret evidence in ways that fit their preferences rather than assessing it neutrally. The theory is increasingly used to explain policy processes as part of a behavioural approach to public administration, but it has limitations. As psychological research relies on experiments, the question remains what role motivated reasoning plays in real-world policy processes. Based on ethnographic observations collected during the planning phase of a large infrastructure project, this study confirms that motivated reasoning explains how people interpret information. However, it also shows that peoples' context has a great impact on their reasoning. Ultimately, we suggest that a focus on time and real-world context is essential in understanding processes of reasoning, for which methodological diversification is needed. Points for practitioners People are inclined to interpret information in light of existing attitudes, rather than approach it neutrally. They read it in such a way that it confirms their attitudes, or are critical of it when it does not. Conflicts caused by differentiating views can be better understood by looking at the attitudes that inform these views. Discussions that might seem aimless at first might have secondary functions such as building trust amongst participants.

Western democracies are increasingly defined by identity politics, where politics appeals to both political and other social identities. Consequently, political information processing should depend not just on political identity, but also on other identities, such as gender, race, or sexuality. For any given issue, we argue that the extent to which reasoning is motivated by one's political identity depends on citizens' group status in other relevant identities, that is, that political identity more strongly motivates high-status group members than low-status group members for issues of identity politics. A survey experiment (N = 1012) concerning a gender quota policy shows that political identity motivates men more strongly than women, leading to political polarization between left-wing and right-wing men, but not women. This suggests that political motivated reasoning should be addressed differently in situations of identity politics, and urges the consideration of group status as a conditional factor of motivated reasoning.

Using motivated reasoning, voters rely on partisanship as a heuristic for evaluating the economy in belief-preserving ways. Yet recent findings show that these motivations may be restricted by a range of contextual factors. We argue that partisan motivations in economic perceptions are moderated by the local economic context. As conditions worsen, a negative information environment leads in-partisans to political ambivalence that reduces confidence in party cues when evaluating the economy. As conditions improve, the motivation for in-partisans to rely on party cues is restored. As positive information has been shown to be less influential for opinion formation than negative information, and out-group members tend to be most prone to motivated reasoning, the economic context should moderate the political motivations of out-partisans to a lesser extent than in-partisans. A multilevel analysis of the 1980 to 2012 American National Election Studies supplemented with state-level data on unemployment and per capita disposable income supports this argument. The effects of in-party attachments on economic perceptions are diminished as economic conditions deteriorate and grow stronger as conditions improve. Moreover, the conditional effects of economic performance on subjective perceptions are stronger for in-partisans than for out-partisans.

AbstractDo partisan disagreements over politically relevant facts, and preferences for the information sources from which to obtain them, represent genuine differences of opinion or insincere cheerleading? The answer to this question is crucial for understanding the scope of partisan polarization. We test between these alternatives with experiments that offer incentives for correct survey responses and allow respondents to search for information before answering each question. We find that partisan cheerleading inflates divides in factual information, but only modestly. Incentives have no impact on partisan divides in information search; these divides are no different from those that occur outside the survey context when we examine web‐browsing data from the same respondents. Overall, our findings support the motivated reasoning interpretation of misinformation; partisans seek out information with congenial slant and sincerely adopt inaccurate beliefs that cast their party in a favorable light.

We draw from theories of motivated reasoning, dual-processing models, and attribution of responsibility to examine how scientific messages may increase public polarization with respect to emerging risk issues such as Lyme disease. A nationally representative sample of Americans (N = 460) read messages about Lyme disease that varied the framing of responsibility for the prevalence of the disease (human/wildlife vs. wildlife only) and when its effects will occur (today vs. in the next 10 years). The influence of framing was contingent on participants' partisanship, which resulted in a boomerang effect among Republicans and increased the degree of political polarization regarding support for proenvironmental behaviors.

AbstractResearch on partisan motivated reasoning shows that citizens perceive the world differently based upon their partisan allegiances. Here we marshal evidence from several national surveys to investigate whether partisan motivated reasoning is attenuated among partisans situated within disagreeable political discussion networks. While our analyses suggest that exposure to interpersonal disagreement is associated with weaker partisan identities, we find limited evidence that disagreement attenuates partisan differences in knowledge or retrospective evaluations of the economy. This suggests that interpersonal disagreement is unlikely to help reduce partisan motivated reasoning. Our results thus speak to important debates concerning the influence of social discussion on political attitudes, the nature of partisan motivated reasoning and the ability of citizens to hold elites accountable.

Introduction. This paper examines the potential of the motivated reasoning approach as a framework explaining why people prefer and use health-related misinformation. Method. Conceptual analysis of a sample of 41 studies drawing on the motivated reasoning approach examine the selection and use of information and misinformation. Results. Preferring and using health-related misinformation occur most likely when people are primarily driven by directional goals. They tend to give rise to confirmation bias which favours the adherence to existing beliefs about the relevance of information sources of certain types, for example, websites advocating anti-vaccination ideas. Moreover, disconfirmation bias results in the rejection of information that challenges the existing beliefs about an issue. Directional goals seldom appear in a pure form because motivated reasoning is also driven by accuracy goals motivating people to select and use information that enables them to support, justify and defend their beliefs against critique. Conclusion. Motivated reasoning offers a relatively robust psychological approach to the study of reasons by which people prefer and use misinformation in order to confirm their existing beliefs and to protect their identities. There is a need to explore further the potential and limitations of the motivated reasoning approach by conducting empirical research focusing on controversial and politicized issues such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed

There exists a gap in our understanding of what citizen satisfaction evaluations actually represent. While recent years have witnessed a move away from performance‐based models to cognitive‐implicit models of citizen satisfaction, the inherent political nature of government, its institutions, and services has been largely ignored. Drawing on the functional responsibility chain between political principals and governmental, public‐service‐delivering institutions, we outline a theory of citizen satisfaction that accounts for the political nature of these institutions. In the context of two consecutive general elections, we find a partisan bias in citizen satisfaction with government and the legislative branch, but not for institutions that are more clearly separated from national government. These mixed findings are suggestive of a dispersion effect of the partisan bias in citizen satisfaction, namely, that citizens are less likely to use their partisan lenses in cases where the responsibility of political principals is dispersed across multiple actors.