Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection

By Dan Kahan. Judgment and Decision Making, 2013

876 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Decision scientists have identified various plausible sources of ideological polarization over climate change, gun violence, national security, and like issues that turn on empirical evidence. This paper describes a study of three of them: the predominance of heuristic-driven information processing by members of the public; ideologically motivated reasoning; and the cognitive-style correlates of political conservativism. The study generated both observational and experimental data inconsistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism is distinctively associated with either unreflective thinking or motivated reasoning. Conservatives did no better or worse than liberals on the Cognitive Reflection Test (Frederick, 2005), an objective measure of information-processing dispositions associated with cognitive biases. In addition, the study found that ideologically motivated reasoning is not a consequence of over-reliance on heuristic or intuitive forms of reasoning generally. On the contrary, subjects who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition. These findings corroborated an alternative hypothesis, which identifies ideologically motivated cognition as a form of information processing that promotes individuals’ interests in forming and maintaining beliefs that signify their loyalty to important affinity groups. The paper discusses the practical significance of these findings, including the need to develop science communication strategies that shield policy-relevant facts from the influences that turn them into divisive symbols of political identity.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae88caf04d9c0b08d040460887867494d4038148

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Citations in the corpus

The Role of Evidence in Politics: Motivated Reasoning and Persuasion among Politicians (2017, neutral): “40 Kahan 2013.”
Everyday Consequences of Analytic Thinking (2015, positive): “In contrast, analytic thinking polarizes preexisting opinions about anthropogenic global warming (Kahan et al., 2012), perhaps because it is a very politically charged issue that is highly susceptible to motivated reasoning (i.e., “identity-protective cognition”; Kahan, 2013).”
Reflective liberals and intuitive conservatives: A look at the Cognitive Reflection Test and ideology (2015, neutral): “Kahan (2013) was focused more centrally on this correlation between reﬂection and ideology, and found no signiﬁcant relationship at all.”
The Nature and Development of Critical-Analytic Thinking (2014, background): “In recent publications by researchers such as Karmiloff-Smith and Farran (2012) and Green and Dunbar (2012), it has been argued that epigenetic processes, whereby genes and environment mutually contribute to both the development of thinking and various manifestations of thought, provide new lenses b”
Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing (2017, positive): “This result, we’ve explained, is plausibly attributed to MS2R—the recruitment of conscious, effortful information processing to protect the interest individuals have in forming beliefs that affirm their political identities (Kahan 2013; Kahan et al. in press).”
Culturally antagonistic memes and the Zika virus: an experimental test (2017, positive): “The dangers that such advocacy posed to the HPV vaccine in the US were anticipated and even empirically modeled before they actually ripened into reason-eviscerating conditions of cultural conflict (Kahan 2013a).”
Are neoliberals more susceptible to bullshit? (2016, background): “…differences between liberals and conservatives when it comes to cognitive style and reasoning ability (Conway et al., 2016; Crawford, 2012; Kahan, 2012, 2013), (b) individuals who exhibit thinking styles that are simplistic and certainty-oriented are generally drawn to leftist (vs.…”
Thinking clearly about causal inferences of politically motivated reasoning: why paradigmatic study designs often undermine causal inference (2019, background): “To take a concrete example from earlier, it is unlikely that people have a specific prior belief about the validity of the Cognitive Reflection Test [13].”
Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government (2017, background): “…engagement with the information in the gun ban conditions generates an identity-affirming conclusion, ICT predicts that highnumeracy subjects will ‘settle’ for heuristic reasoning, and end up with the wrong interpretation of the data, just as their low-numeracy counterparts will (Kahan, 2013).”
Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. (2019, neutral): “To muddy the waters further, the evidence for ideological asymmetry in the disposition to think analytically has been more equivocal (Jost, 2017; Kahan, 2013; Yilmaz & Saribay, 2017a, 2017b, 2016).”