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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 attitudes increases when more evidence is provided.

We study the causal relationship between moral values ("ought" statements) and factual beliefs ("is" statements) and show that, contrary to predictions of orthodox Bayesian models, values exert an influence on beliefs. This effect is mediated by prior political leanings and, thus, contributes to increasing polarization in beliefs about facts. We study this process of motivated political reasoning in a preregistered online experiment with a nationally representative sample of 1,500 individuals in the US. Additionally, we show that subjects do not distort their beliefs in response to financial incentives to do so, suggesting that deep values exert a stronger motivational force.

We study the causal relationship between moral values ("ought" statements) and factual beliefs ("is" statements) and show that, contrary to predictions of orthodox Bayesian models, values exert an influence on beliefs. This effect is mediated by prior political leanings and, thus, contributes to increasing polarization in beliefs about facts. We study this process of motivated political reasoning in a preregistered online experiment with a nationally representative sample of 1,500 individuals in the US. Additionally, we show that subjects do not distort their beliefs in response to financial incentives to do so, suggesting that deep values exert a stronger motivational force.

In this study, we investigate how partisan motivations shape voters' reactions to a political scandal by drawing on a unique survey experiment fielded immediately after Justin Trudeau's brownface/blackface scandal broke during the 2019 Canadian election. We thus explore motivated reasoning in real time in a competitive and highly partisan election context. Are voters more willing to forgive politicians for past behavior when their own party leader's impropriety is cued? To what extent do personal interests, such as cross‐pressures or electoral concerns, affect the motivation to forgive? Our findings show that partisan‐motivated reasoning is overwhelmingly powerful, producing politically biased judgments of politicians implicated in scandals. Furthermore, voters' willingness to forgive scandals is also influenced by "strategic" considerations, in that preferences over which political party wins or loses in the election affect opinions about whether someone should be forgiven or whether the scandal is considered important at all. However, we find no evidence that personal involvement in the issue raised by the scandal conditions partisan motivations. We posit that the environment—in this case, a competitive election—is an important consideration for understanding the extent and limits of partisan‐motivated reasoning.

AbstractRecent work by Kahan et al. (2017) on the psychology of motivated numeracy in the context of intracultural disagreement suggests that people are less likely to employ their capabilities when the evidence runs contrary to their political ideology. This research has so far been carried out primarily in the USA regarding the liberal–conservative divide over gun control regulation. In this paper, we present the results of a modified replication that included an active reasoning intervention with Western European participants regarding both the hierarchy–egalitarianism and individualism–collectivism divides over immigration policy (n = 746; considerably less than the preregistration sample size). We reproduce the motivated numeracy effect, though we do not find evidence of increased polarization of high-numeracy participants.

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.

Education exacerbates partisan gaps in scientific knowledge and attitudes. However, previous findings about the extent and symmetry of this moderation have been mixed. As a conceptual replication of previous research, this study examines whether education asymmetrically moderates the Democrat-Republican gap in attitudes about Ebola virus disease (EVD) and policies to combat EVD. Weighted data from a survey of 1,461 non-institutionalized adults drawn from a probability-based panel were collected during the 2015 EVD epidemic. The survey measured seven attitudes: fear of personal infection, estimated severity of Ebola, suspicion of exposed Africans, suspicion of exposed Americans, Western government preparedness, support for low-intensity interventions, and support for high-intensity interventions. Knowledge about EVD was also measured. As in prior studies, highly educated Democrats uniquely diverged from other respondents in some attitudes. However, in the other attitudes, there were main party and education effects but no evidence that education was a moderator of partisan differences. Overall, education moderated partisanship when attitudes were affect-laden and targeted toward immediate threats, but not when attitudes were policy-oriented.

AbstractPeople's risk estimates often do not align with the evidence available to them. In particular, people tend to discount bad news (such as evidence suggesting their risk of being involved in a car accident is higher than they thought) as compared to good news (evidence suggesting it is lower) – this is known as the belief update bias. It has been assumed that individuals use motivated reasoning to rationalise away unwanted evidence (e.g., "I am a safe driver, thus these statistics do not apply to me"). However, whether reasoning is required to discount bad news has not been tested directly. Here, we restrict cognitive resources using a cognitive load (Experiment 1) and a time restriction manipulation (Experiment 3) and find that while these manipulations diminish learning in general, they do not diminish the bias. Furthermore, we also show that the relative neglect of bad news happens the moment new evidence is presented, not when participants are subsequently prompted to state their belief (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that reasoning is not required for bad news to be discounted as compared to good news.

Background: Distorted gambling-related cognitions are tightly related to gambling problems, and are one of the main targets of treatment for disordered gambling, but their etiology remains uncertain. Although folk wisdom and some theoretical approaches have linked them to lower domain-general reasoning abilities, evidence regarding that relationship remains unconvincing. Method: In the present cross-sectional study, the relationship between probabilistic/abstract reasoning, as measured by the Berlin Numeracy Test (BNT), and the Matrices Test, respectively, and the five dimensions of the Gambling-Related Cognitions Scale (GRCS), was tested in a sample of 77 patients with gambling disorder and 58 individuals without gambling problems. Results and interpretation: Neither BNT nor matrices scores were significantly related to gambling-related cognitions, according to frequentist (MANCOVA/ANCOVA) analyses, performed both considering and disregarding group (patients, non-patients) in the models. Correlation Bayesian analyses (bidirectional BF10) largely supported the null hypothesis, i.e., the absence of relationships between the measures of interest. This pattern or results reinforces the idea that distorted cognitions do not originate in a general lack of understanding of probability or low fluid intelligence, but probably result from motivated reasoning. ; Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad) PSI201345055-P PSI2017-85488-P ; Spanish Government (Secretaria de Estado de Investigacion, Desarrollo e Innovacion) PSI201345055-P PSI2017-85488-P ; Spanish Government (Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER, European Union) PSI201345055-P PSI2017-85488-P ; Spanish Government (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades) PRE2018-085150 ; Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation post-doctoral contract (Juan de la Cierva) FJC2018036047-I