Do Justification Requirements Reduce Motivated Reasoning in Politicians’ Evaluation of Policy Information? An Experimental Investigation.

Christensen, Julian; Moynihan, Donald P.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3295014

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Not all strategies that modify the decision maker are equally promising. For example, Christensen (2018a) shows that asking for justification decreases politicians’ ability to make informed decisions. Cantarelli, Bellé, and Belardinelli (2018) tested an educational debiasing intervention in public service.…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing to Debias: Measuring and Reducing Public Managers’ Anchoring Bias

Nagtegaal

Tummers

Noordegraaf

et al. 2020

Public Administration Review

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Public managers’ decisions are affected by cognitive biases. For instance, employees’ previous year's performance ratings influence new ratings irrespective of actual performance. Nevertheless, experimental knowledge of public managers’ cognitive biases is limited, and debiasing techniques have rarely been studied. Using a survey experiment on 1,221 public managers and employees in the United Kingdom, this research (1) replicates two experiments on anchoring to establish empirical generalization across institutional contexts and (2) tests a consider‐the‐opposite debiasing technique. The results indicate that anchoring bias replicates in a different institutional context, although effect sizes differ. Furthermore, a low‐cost, low‐intensity consider‐the‐opposite technique mitigates anchoring bias in this survey experiment. An exploratory subgroup analysis indicates that the effect of the intervention depends on context. The next step is to test this strategy in real‐world settings.

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Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing to Debias: Measuring and Reducing Public Managers’ Anchoring Bias

Nagtegaal

Tummers

Noordegraaf

et al. 2020

Public Administration Review

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show abstract

“…However, the effectiveness of the justification task has been questioned (Belardinelli, Bellé, Sicilia & Steccolini, 2018;Leboeuf & Shafir, 2003). Additional findings have suggested that the effectiveness of decision justification is task-dependent (Leisti, Radun, Virtanen, Nyman, & Häkkinen, 2014) and that it may even harm decisions (Igou & Bless, 2007), especially in specific contexts prone to motivated reasoning (Christensen, 2018;Sieck, Quinn & Schooler, 1999). Given the promising but mixed findings on the effectiveness of the justification task, we used this simple technique as an alternative reflection manipulation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Activating reflective thinking with decision justification and debiasing training

2020

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Manipulations for activating reflective thinking, although regularly used in the literature, have not previously been systematically compared. There are growing concerns about the effectiveness of these methods as well as increasing demand for them. Here, we study five promising reflection manipulations using an objective performance measure — the Cognitive Reflection Test 2 (CRT-2). In our large-scale preregistered online experiment (N = 1,748), we compared a passive and an active control condition with time delay, memory recall, decision justification, debiasing training, and combination of debiasing training and decision justification. We found no evidence that online versions of the two regularly used reflection conditions — time delay and memory recall — improve cognitive performance. Instead, our study isolated two less familiar methods that can effectively and rapidly activate reflective thinking: (1) a brief debiasing training, designed to avoid common cognitive biases and increase reflection, and (2) simply asking participants to justify their decisions.

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“…Policy losers either must accept a higher level of dissonance or think more positively about the outcome, since it was made fairly. Tellingly, most interventions to de-bias the processing of political information are, at best, moderately successful (Bolsen et al, 2014; Christensen, 2017; Kahan, 2016; Nyhan & Reifler, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to be Gracious about Political Loss—The Importance of Good Loser Messages in Policy Controversies

Esaiasson

Arnesen

Werner

2022

Comparative Political Studies

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Accepting defeat in political decision-making is crucial for the health of democracies. At the same time, being a good loser is challenging. How can citizens be motivated to be gracious about various types of political loss? In this paper, we study whether political leaders can play an important role in boosting the perceived quality of decision-making processes among losers in policy conflicts. We propose and test the impact of a simple intervention post-decision: good loser messages delivered by co-partisan leaders that remind citizens about the rules of the game. Three survey experiments on probability samples of the Norwegian and Swedish population (total n = 4700) show that good loser messages can indeed boost the process evaluations of policy losers. These findings emphasize the potential of procedural messaging to build loser’s consent between elections.

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Do Justification Requirements Reduce Motivated Reasoning in Politicians’ Evaluation of Policy Information? An Experimental Investigation.

Cited by 3 publications

References 43 publications

Designing to Debias: Measuring and Reducing Public Managers’ Anchoring Bias

Designing to Debias: Measuring and Reducing Public Managers’ Anchoring Bias

Activating reflective thinking with decision justification and debiasing training

How to be Gracious about Political Loss—The Importance of Good Loser Messages in Policy Controversies

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