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General election presidential debates are highly argumentative encounters filled with evidence, argument, and refutation. While the candidates come to the debates armed with evidence and arguments in support of their positions, it is unclear how the audience interprets the information. This paper reports the findings from a study of the first presidential debate in 2012. Participants evaluated the strength of arguments made by Obama and Romney, as well as which candidate won each segment of the debate. The study confirms that viewers do not dispassionately evaluate the debate, but instead are driven by partisan interests that lead them to find their candidate made stronger arguments and won the debate. Partisan motivations overwhelmed the structural changes in the 2012 debate format designed to encourage more in-depth discussion of the topic.

AbstractPolitical accountability requires that voters understand the distribution of policy outcome responsibility among their vote choice options. Research on partisan‐motivated reasoning suggests that voters do not meet this requirement. The problem is that voters condition their attributions of responsibility to the government on their party identification. Government identifiers credit the government for desirable outcomes and blame external forces such as the global economy for undesirable outcomes. This paper draws a more optimistic conclusion. It argues that focusing on the perceived responsibility of the government and external forces is not sufficient for understanding whether voters meet the responsibility attribution requirement. It is also necessary to compare the perceived responsibility of government parties to the perceived responsibility of opposition parties because those are the options that voters get to choose from. This party distribution of perceived responsibility is analyzed with original survey data from Denmark and the United Kingdom. The results demonstrate that while party identification does indeed condition voters' responsibility attributions, both government identifiers and independents attribute systematically more responsibility to the government than to the opposition regardless of the desirability of the outcome. This suggests that voters tend to meet the responsibility attribution requirement of accountability despite the presence of partisan‐motivated reasoning.

In this commentary, we embed the volume's contributions on public beliefs about science in a broader theoretical discussion of motivated political reasoning. The studies presented in the preceding section of the volume consistently find evidence for hyperskepticism toward scientific evidence among ideologues, no matter the domain or context—and this skepticism seems to be stronger among conservatives than liberals. Here, we show that these patterns can be understood as part of a general tendency among individuals to defend their prior attitudes and actively challenge attitudinally incongruent arguments, a tendency that appears to be evident among liberals and conservatives alike. We integrate the empirical results reported in this volume into a broader theoretical discussion of the John Q. Public model of information processing and motivated reasoning, which posits that both affective and cognitive reactions to events are triggered unconsciously. We find that the work in this volume is largely consistent with our theories of affect-driven motivated reasoning and biased attitude formation.

In this article, I discuss what motivated reasoning research tells us about the prospects for deliberative democracy. In section I, I introduce the results of several political psychology studies examining the problematic affective and cognitive processing of political information by individuals in nondeliberative, experimental environments. This is useful because these studies are often neglected in political philosophy literature. Section II has three stages. First, I sketch how the study results from section I question the practical viability of deliberative democracy. Second, I briefly present the results of three empirical studies of political deliberation that can be interpreted to counter the findings of the studies in section I. Third, I show why this is a misinterpretation and that the study results from section I mean that it is implausible that sites of political deliberation would naturally emerge from the wide public sphere and coalesce into institutionalized forms of the practice such that deliberative democracy can satisfy its raison d'être. Finally, in section III, I conclude that viable conceptions of deliberative democracy should be limited to narrower aims.

With the rise of social media and fast-paced news, the American electorate is inundated with information now more than ever. One of the consequences of the increase in technology is the proliferation of fake news. Fake news is defined as "fabricated information that mimics news media content in form but not in organizational process or intent" (Lazer et al. 2018). The growth of the Internet means that more information is conveniently accessible to people without any sort of vetting for factual basis.Although scholars have done much to chart the landscape of fake news, less is known about how much people believe it and why. This dissertation seeks to understand the role of news source cues and the individual characteristics and traits that shape the believability of news. The credibility of a source affects whether people believe what they see, read, or hear. When the source is high in credibility, people are likely to accept the information as true but if the source is low in credibility, people are likely to be skeptical or reject the information. For the news, previous research suggests that source credibility matters in precisely this way (Druckman 2001). Yet, the credibility of a news source can be ambiguous, and people often have biases that predispose them to believing a story. Such is the world of fake news wherein "news organizations" masquerading as reputable sources peddle sensationalistic stories. Using a nationally representative sample, I conducted a survey experiment featuring ten news stories and a variety of news sources, mainstream and fake. I find little evidence that people are mindful of the news source. Regardless of whether a story comes from a well-established source such as ABC News or an unknown fake news source, people largely disregard news source cues. Instead, in line with the theories of partisan motivated reasoning, respondents react to the partisan tenor of news, believing news that confirms their partisan biases and disbelieving news to the contrary. Aside from partisanship, I also find various traits, some political and some nonpolitical such as the Big 5 personality traits, to help account for who is susceptible to fake news. I find that those who are low in political knowledge, high in self-monitoring, and high in magical thinking are more likely to be susceptible to believing in fake news.

ABSTRACT: Recent studies find motivated reasoning in citizens' processing of information about public performance. Using experiments in the US and Denmark, we examine effects on an accuracy-based task of two forms of motivated reasoning: partisan identity-based reasoning and reasoning from ideology-based governance preferences (favoring either the public or the private sector). The experiments incorporate a political prime, a health care needs prime (to reduce politicization), and a neutral, no-prime, condition. We find that priming citizens to think politically accentuates the influence of partisan identities and governance preferences on reasoning. In contrast, priming about the need for a service reduces these biases. These findings extend knowledge of motivated reasoning in an accuracy-based task and priming with a no-prime benchmark, and confirm some findings of previous studies. Reducing the salience of partisan identities or governance preferences in the presentation of information may help stimulate more accuracy-based reasoning about public performance.

A large disconnect exists between the general public's acceptance of human-caused climate change and the prevailing consensus of actively publishing scientists. Previous research has examined both political and economic motivated reasoning, media influence in print and television, conspiracy ideation as a predictor of science rejection, and the role of the social construction of scientific knowledge in science rejection. Using these previously studied justifications for climate change rejection as a starting point, this research examines 212 written responses to a prompt at Climate Etc. asking the community to explain their acceptance / rejection of climate change. Using a textual content analysis, this study finds that media choice, motivated reasoning, conspiracy ideation, and the scientific construction of knowledge all play important roles in explanations for climate science rejection. Work and educational background, as well as a reframing of the scientific consensus as a "religion," add new analytical perspectives to the motivated reasoning explanations offered in prior research. This analysis also finds that the explanations for climate science denial given by respondents are often complex, falling into two or more of the explanation types suggesting that science rejection may be a more complex social process than previously thought. ; 2015-08-01 ; M.A. ; Sciences, Sociology ; Masters ; This record was generated from author submitted information.

AbstractRecent polls reveal that between 20% and 25% of Americans erroneously indicate that President Obama is a Muslim. In this article, we compare individuals' explicit responses on a survey about religion and politics with reaction time data from an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to investigate whether individuals truly associate Obama with Islam or are motivated reasoners who simply express negativity about the president when given the opportunity. Our results suggest that predispositions such as ideology, partisanship, and race affect how citizens feel about Obama, which in turn motivates them to accept misinformation about the president. We also find that these implicit associations increase the probability of stating that Obama is likely a Muslim. Interestingly, political sophistication does not appear to inoculate citizens from exposure to misinformation, as they exhibit the same IAT effect as less knowledgeable individuals.

AbstractCanonical models of costly signaling in international relations (IR) tend to assume costly signals speak for themselves: a signal's costliness is typically understood to be a function of the signal, not the perceptions of the recipient. Integrating the study of signaling in IR with research on motivated skepticism and asymmetric updating from political psychology, we show that individuals' tendencies to embrace information consistent with their overarching belief systems (and dismiss information inconsistent with it) has important implications for how signals are interpreted. We test our theory in the context of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran, combining two survey experiments fielded on members of the American mass public. We find patterns consistent with motivated skepticism: the individuals most likely to update their beliefs are those who need reassurance the least, such that costly signals cause polarization rather than convergence. Successful signaling therefore requires knowing something about the orientations of the signal's recipient.

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.