Do beliefs yield to evidence? Examining belief perseverance vs. change in response to congruent empirical findings

Anglin, Stephanie M.

doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2019.02.004

Cited by 38 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…As a consequence of biased assimilation, people interpret new evidence to align with their preexisting beliefs and expectations, even if the evidence does not actually support them (Lord et al, 1979). Given that ambiguous evidence supports many interpretations that are difficult to falsify, biased assimilation is especially likely to occur when evidence is mixed or inconclusive (Anglin, 2019).…”

Section: Political Myside Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stepping Outside the Echo Chamber: Is Intellectual Humility Associated With Less Political Myside Bias?

Bowes

Costello

Lee

et al. 2021

Pers Soc Psychol Bull

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In recent years, an upsurge of polarization has been a salient feature of political discourse in America. A small but growing body of research has examined the potential relevance of intellectual humility (IH) to political polarization. In the present investigation, we extend this work to political myside bias, testing the hypothesis that IH is associated with less bias in two community samples ( N1 = 498; N2 = 477). In line with our expectations, measures of IH were negatively correlated with political myside bias across paradigms, political topics, and samples. These relations were robust to controlling for humility. We also examined ideological asymmetries in the relations between IH and political myside bias, finding that IH–bias relations were statistically equivalent in members of the political left and right. Notwithstanding important limitations and caveats, these data establish IH as one of a small handful psychological features known to predict less political myside bias.

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Section: Political Myside Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stepping Outside the Echo Chamber: Is Intellectual Humility Associated With Less Political Myside Bias?

Bowes

Costello

Lee

et al. 2021

Pers Soc Psychol Bull

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Third, it is somewhat unclear how researchers should interpret people's self-reported evaluations of new information when inferring their capacity for politically biased cognitive processing. In particular, the two outcome variables of (i) information evaluations versus (ii) posterior beliefs following exposure to the information can yield divergent results (Anglin, 2019), and sometimes dramatically so (Kunda, 1987). For example, Kunda (1987) studied how heavycoffee-drinking women evaluated a piece of research that linked heavy coffee drinking among women to a specific type of disease.…”

Section: Our Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating

2020

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A surprising finding from U.S. opinion surveys is that political disagreements tend to be greatest among the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans. Recent experiments suggest a hypothesis that could explain this pattern: cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing of new information. However, the designs of these experiments tend to contain several limitations that complicate their support for this hypothesis. In particular, they tend to (i) focus on people's worldviews and political identities, at the expense of their other, more specific prior beliefs, (ii) lack direct comparison with a politically unbiased benchmark, and (iii) focus on people's judgments of new information, rather than on their posterior beliefs following exposure to the information. We report two studies designed to address these limitations. In our design, U.S. subjects received noisy but informative signals about the truth or falsity of partisan political questions, and we measured their prior and posterior beliefs, and cognitive sophistication, operationalized as analytic thinking inferred via performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test. We compared subjects' posterior beliefs to an unbiased Bayesian benchmark. We found little evidence that analytic thinking magnified politically biased deviations from the benchmark. In contrast, we found consistent evidence that greater analytic thinking was associated with posterior beliefs closer to the benchmark. Together, these results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing. We discuss differences between our design and prior work that can inform future tests of this hypothesis.

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Section: Our Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating

Tappin¹,

Pennycook²,

Rand³

2019

Preprint

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A surprising finding from U.S. opinion surveys is that political disagreements tend to be greatest among the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans. Recent experiments suggest a hypothesis that could explain this pattern: cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing of new information. However, the designs of these experiments tend to contain several limitations that complicate their support for this hypothesis. In particular, they tend to (i) focus on people’s worldviews and political identities, at the expense of their other, more specific prior beliefs, (ii) lack direct comparison with a politically unbiased benchmark, and (iii) focus on people’s judgments of new information, rather than on their posterior beliefs following exposure to the information. We report two studies designed to address these limitations. In our design, U.S. subjects received noisy but informative signals about the truth or falsity of partisan political questions, and we measured their prior and posterior beliefs, and cognitive sophistication, operationalized as analytic thinking inferred via performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test. We compared subjects’ posterior beliefs to an unbiased Bayesian benchmark. We found little evidence that analytic thinking magnified politically biased deviations from the benchmark. In contrast, we found consistent evidence that greater analytic thinking was associated with posterior beliefs closer to the benchmark. Together, these results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing. We discuss differences between our design and prior work that can inform future tests of this hypothesis.

show abstract

Do beliefs yield to evidence? Examining belief perseverance vs. change in response to congruent empirical findings

Cited by 38 publications

References 45 publications

Stepping Outside the Echo Chamber: Is Intellectual Humility Associated With Less Political Myside Bias?

Stepping Outside the Echo Chamber: Is Intellectual Humility Associated With Less Political Myside Bias?

Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating

Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating

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