Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election

By Drew Westen, Pavel S. Blagov, K. Harenski, C. Kilts, Stephan Hamann. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2006

516 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Research on political judgment and decision-making has converged with decades of research in clinical and social psychology suggesting the ubiquity of emotion-biased motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is a form of implicit emotion regulation in which the brain converges on judgments that minimize negative and maximize positive affect states associated with threat to or attainment of motives. To what extent motivated reasoning engages neural circuits involved in cold reasoning and conscious emotion regulation (e.g., suppression) is, however, unknown. We used functional neuroimaging to study the neural responses of 30 committed partisans during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004. We presented subjects with reasoning tasks involving judgments about information threatening to their own candidate, the opposing candidate, or neutral control targets. Motivated reasoning was associated with activations of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, insular cortex, and lateral orbital cortex. As predicted, motivated reasoning was not associated with neural activity in regions previously linked to cold reasoning tasks and conscious (explicit) emotion regulation. The findings provide the first neuroimaging evidence for phenomena variously described as motivated reasoning, implicit emotion regulation, and psychological defense. They suggest that motivated reasoning is qualitatively distinct from reasoning when people do not have a strong emotional stake in the conclusions reached.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7bc903b32b490df746aeb857acdca7fe4b1b541

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Citations in the corpus

Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government (2017, background): “Some researchers have assumed (not unreasonably) that ideologically motivated cognition – the tendency selectively to credit or discredit information in patterns that gratify one’s political or cultural predispositions – reflects over-reliance on the heuristic forms of information processing associa”
An fMRI study of violations of social expectations: When people are not who we expect them to be (2011, unknown): “Previous fMRI studies have examined the congruency of affective associations towards social targets (Harris and Fiske, 2009; Knutson et al., 2006; Westen et al., 2006) and, using electroencephalography (EEG), both regulation of racial bias and perceived violations of social expectations have been in”
Not so Fast. On Some Bold Neuroscientific Claims Concerning Human Agency (2010, background): “In these cases, the “instinctive” judgment driven by unconscious emotions seemed always to prevail, since the subjects showed emotion-biased motivated reasoning, “a form of implicit emotion regulation in which the brain converges on judgments that minimize negative and maximize positive affect state”
Interpreting Performance Information: Motivated Reasoning or Unbiased Comprehension (2016, background): “According to Westen et al., motivated reasoning can even “be viewed as a form of implicit aﬀ ect regulation in which the brain converges on solutions that minimize negative and maximize positive aﬀ ect states” (2006, 1947).”
Political Neuroscience: The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship (2014, background): “…preferred candidate's inconsistency Partisans may experience relief when opportunity arises to resolve inconsistency about preferred candidate Westen et al., 2006 Rating agreement/disagreement with political statements Increased activation for moderate (vs. radical) statements Reward is…”