A Causal Role for Negative Affect: Misattribution in Biased Evaluations of Scientific Information

Abstract

The role of negative affect as a potential causal mechanism underlying the tendency for prior attitudes to bias evaluations of scientific information was investigated using a misattribution of affect manipulation. Participants read scientific studies that disconfirmed prior beliefs. Half the participants were given the opportunity to misattribute any negative affect to poor room conditions (Study 1) or caffeinated water (Study 2). All participants then evaluated the methodological quality of the scientific information. Those in the misattribution condition evaluated the information more positively than those in the control condition. In Study 2, no differences were found for participants reading confirming information. The role of affect in attitude resistance is discussed.A strong attitude colors judgments about the quality of information that confirms or disconfirms beliefs that support the attitude. Belief-confirming information is evaluated favorably, while belief-disconfirming information is evaluated unfavorably. This biased assimilation of information allows a person to maintain the belief and the attitude in the face of disconfirming information. Even scientific methods can be differentially evaluated depending on the results. Belief-confirming scientific results are valued and used to garner further support for the attitude, while beliefdisconfirming results are denigrated and dismissed. The current research examined one factor, negative affect, that may play a causal role in the biasing effect of strong attitudes on evaluations of scientific information. Biased Evaluations of Attitude-relevant Scientific InformationCoining the term biased assimilation, Lord, Ross, and Lepper (1979) demonstrated that proponents and opponents of capital punishment differentially evaluated two scientific studies revealing opposing results and conclusions regarding the deterrent efficacy of capital punishment. Importantly, the methodology and results were

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“…Finally, significant correlations between participants' positive and negative emotions and their reactions to the resistor suggest the possibility that emotional reactions might be an important mechanism in the evaluations of the resistor. This would be consistent with a growing body of both correlational (Munro & Ditto, 1997;Munro et al, 2002;Zuwerink & Devine, 1996) and experimental evidence (Munro et al, 2012) supporting the role of emotion in motivated reasoning processes. If affective/emotional processes are central to the biased perceptions of others as evinced in the current research, research on bias reduction processes that focus on emotion regulation might be particularly fruitful.…”

“…Finally, we included measures of participants' self-reported emotional reactions to reading the scenario. Research on motivated reasoning supports the notion that emotions can be tied to biased evaluations of information (Lodge & Tab er, 2005;Munro & Ditto, 1997;Munro et al, 2002;Munro, Stansbury, & Tsai, 2012;Westen, Blagov, Harenski, Kilts, & Hamann, 2006). Thus, we included the emotional reaction measure to determine whether the scenario produced emotional reactions that might be correlated with the impressions of the target (e.g., a negative emotional reaction to the target would be associated with a negative evaluation of the target).…”

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“…The Article Quality measure assessed the participant's perception of the quality of the article (α = .87, Munro & Ditto, 1997;Munro et al, 2012). Participants answered four questions such as "How convincing was the article as evidence" (1 = completely unconvincing; 9 = completely convincing), to determine their view of the article's quality.…”