The Distortion of Related Beliefs

Abstract

When forming beliefs about themselves, politics, and how the world works more generally, people often face a tension between conclusions they inherently wish to reach and those which are plausible. And the likelihood of beliefs about one variable (e.g., the performance of a favored politician) depends on beliefs about other, related variables (e.g., the quality and bias of newspapers reporting on the politician). I propose a formal approach to combine these two forces, creating a tractable way to study the distortion of related beliefs. The approach unifies several central ideas from psychology (e.g., motivated reasoning, attribution) that have been applied heavily to political science. Concrete applications shed light on why successful individuals sometimes attribute their performance to luck ("imposter syndrome"), why those from advantaged groups believe they in fact face high levels of discrimination (the "persecution complex"), and why partisans disagree about the accuracy and bias of news sources.

Does Public Diplomacy Sway Foreign Public Opinion? Identifying the Effect of High-Level Visits

“…This would be the case if citizens of a host country pay more attention to visiting leaders from powerful states-that is, if they view more powerful visitors as better able to bestow benefits, or cause hardship, through their policies. Similarly, host-country citizens may be more receptive to the powerful visitors' images and messages due to a process of motivated reasoning (Little 2019). If they understand the potential for substantial inducements or threats from the visiting leader, they may see it as in their interest to take on a shared perspective with the visiting country.…”

Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes through Interpersonal Conversation: Evidence from Three Field Experiments

“…First, yielding to persuasion may necessarily involve admitting that one has held views that were in error, threatening self-image (Cohen, Aronson, and Steele 2000). Second, individuals’ current attitudes may support their self-image while contrary attitudes may endanger it; for example, admitting that one’s political party supports policies one opposes may threaten the self-esteem individuals derive from their partisan identities (Theodoridis 2017), as might recognizing any inconsistency between different attitudes one holds (Little 2019; Steele and Liu 1983). Such motivations may contribute to patterns well-known to political scientists, such as the pattern that individuals adopt their preferred party’s positions on issues (Lenz 2013).…”

Fear and citizen coordination against dictatorship

“…Others have relaxed the assumption that citizens are strategic for one period of a multi-period game (Lupia and Menning, 2009), or for some proportion of the population (Little, 2017), to model the effects of emotions or thoughtfulness of different voters. Other recent models have endogenized preferences to formalize the concepts of cognitive dissonance (Acharya et al, 2018), social identity theory (Dickson & Scheve 2006; Shayo 2009), or motivated reasoning (Little, 2018). We add to these efforts by showing how the effects of emotions on perceptions and basic preferences like risk aversion can be incorporated into a strategic game.…”