Hot Cognition or Cool Consideration? Testing the Effects of Motivated Reasoning on Political Decision Making

Abstract

Researchers attempting to understand how citizens process political information have advanced motivated reasoning to explain the joint role of affect and cognition. The prominence of affect suggests that all social information processing is affectively charged and prone to biases. This article makes use of a unique data set collected using a dynamic information board experiment to test important effects of motivated reasoning. In particular, affective biases should cause citizens to take longer processing information incongruent with their existing affect and such biases should also direct search for new information about candidates. Somewhat perversely, motivated reasoners may actually increase their support of a positively evaluated candidate upon learning new negatively evaluated information. Findings are reported that support all of these expectations. Additional analysis shows that these affective biases may easily lead to lower quality decision making, leading to a direct challenge to the notion of voters as rational Bayesian updaters.

What's Good for the Goose is Bad for the Gander: Negative Political Advertising, Partisanship, and Turnout

“…who exhibit predictable biases in managing information. Strong beliefs often lead to biased memory searches, biased choice of inferential heuristics, and a predisposition to judge arguments supporting existing beliefs to be accurate and to discount contrary arguments (Kunda 1999;Lodge and Taber 2000;Redlawsk 2002). …”

“…Strong beliefs often lead to biased memory searches, biased choice of inferential heuristics, and a predisposition to judge arguments supporting existing beliefs to be accurate and to discount contrary arguments (Kunda 1999;Lodge and Taber 2000;Redlawsk 2002). More recent research by Westen et al (2006) at Emory University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to show that when partisans were presented with information threatening their beliefs about their preferred candidate or an opposition candidate, they reached biased conclusions, with the fMRI showing their effort to reach an ''emotionally stable judgment'' through confirmation bias to have involved primarily the part of the brain associated with processing emotions.…”

A Psicologia Política das Classes Sociais no Brasil: Atributos das Atitudes Políticas por Estratificação e Mobilidade Social

“…Quando pensamos na discussão sobre ambivalência atitudinal, nela fica claro que o processamento de informações é afetado pelo grau de não atitude dos cidadãos. Eleitores mais convencidos e seguros de uma ideia acabam por mais comumente enviesar o uso da informação para fortalecer suas opiniões e atitudes, o que chamamos de "raciocínio motivado" (Kunda, 1990;Redlawsk, 2002). Dessa forma, eleitores com visões mais cristalizadas tendem a dar mais ênfase a informações positivas, selecionando propositalmente as informações que usam, visando confirmação de suas atitudes enraizadas sobre certo objeto (candidato ou partido, por exemplo).…”

Social media mixed with news in political candidate judgment: Order effects on knowledge and affect

“…These models posit that decision makers gather information, weigh choices, and engage in reasoning about costs and benefits of various decisions. However, such models have been challenged by theorists and researchers coming from psychology and other behavioral social sciences [37,76], political sciences [34,42,58,60,61], and media researchers [6,52,82]. A prevailing view now is that people utilize "motivated reasoning" in political decision making [26,34,42,58,60,61] where affect and emotion play a role in deciding about whether information is important, how it should be interpreted, and how it is ultimately remembered.…”

“…This view falls into a broader category of bounded rationality theories [24,30,75,77] in which actors weigh the complexity of a problem against cognitive and other resources. A popular, heuristic-based theory in political psychology is the "on-line running tally" idea [40,41,60]. In this model, people create an initial, schema-based concept of a candidate which they then use as a comparator when new information is encountered.…”