Suchergebnisse

This article examines the boundaries of motivated reasoning in legal decision making. We propose a model of attitudinal influence involving analogical perception. Attitudes influence judgments by affecting the perceived similarity between a target case and cases cited as precedent. Bias should be most apparent in judging similarity when cases are moderately similar on objective dimensions. We conducted two experiments: the first with undergraduates, the second with undergraduates and law students. Participants in each experiment read a mock newspaper article that described a "target case" involving unlawful discrimination. Embedded in the article was a description of a "source case" cited as legal precedent. Participants in both studies were more likely to find source cases with outcomes that supported their policy views in the target dispute as analogous to that litigation. Commensurate with our theory, there was evidence in both experiments that motivated perceptions were most apparent where cases were moderately similar on objective dimensions. Although there were differences in the way lay and law student participants viewed cases, legal training did not appear to attenuate motivated perceptions.

Research in political psychology has shown the importance of motivated reasoning as a prism through which individuals view the political world. From this we develop the hypothesis that, with strong positive beliefs firmly in place, partisan groups ignore or discount information about the performance of political figures they like. We then speculate about how this tendency should manifest itself in presidential approval ratings and test our hypotheses using monthly presidential approval data disaggregated by party identification for the 1955–2005 period. Our results show that partisan groups generally do reward and punish presidents for economic performance, but only those presidents of the opposite party. We also develop a model of presidential approval for self‐identified Independents and, finally, a model of the partisan gap, the difference in approval between Democrat and Republican identifiers.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part 1: The Case for Investigating Motivated Reasoning in Legal Decision Making -- Chapter One: Outlining a Theory of Motivated Cognition in Legal Decision Making -- Chapter Two: A Motivated Reasoning Approach to the Commerce Clause Interpretation of the Rehnquist Court -- Part 2: Testing the Mechanisms -- Chapter Three: Seeing What They Want? Analogical Perception in Discrimination Disputes (with Thomas E. Nelson) -- Chapter Four: Reasoning on the Threshold: Testing the Separability of Preferences in Legal Decision Making -- Chapter Five: Justifying Outcomes? How Legal Decision Makers Explain Threshold Decisions -- Chapter Six: Motivated Reasoning as an Empirical Framework: Finding Our Way Back to Context -- Appenddixes -- A-1: Materials Related to Experiments on Analogical Perception -- A-2: Supplemental Regression Analyses for Experiments on Analogical Perception -- B: Materials Relating to Experiment Testing the Separability of Preferences -- Notes -- References -- Index.

We report the results of an experiment designed to replicate and extend recent findings on motivated political reasoning. In particular, we are interested in disconfirmation biases--the tendency to counter-argue or discount information with which one disagrees--in the processing of political arguments on policy issues. Our experiment examines 8 issues, including some of local relevance and some of national relevance, and manipulates the presentation format of the policy arguments. We find strong support for our basic disconfirmation hypothesis: people seem unable to ignore their prior beliefs when processing arguments or evidence. We also find that this bias is moderated by political sophistication and strength of prior attitude. We do not find, however, that argument type matters, suggesting that motivated biases are quite robust to changes in argument format. Finally, we find strong support for the polarization of attitudes as a consequence of biased processing. Adapted from the source document.