Motivated Biases in Political Reasoning

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Citizens are rarely, if ever, dispassionate when thinking about politics. Rather than treating information about political parties, candidates, or issues evenhandedly, as normative models of rational decisionmaking prescribe, they are prone to accept those facts and arguments they agree with and discount or actively counter argue those which challenge their preconvictions. In short, citizens often are "partisan" in their political beliefs, motivated more by their desire to maintain prior beliefs than by their desire to make "accurate" or otherwise optimal decisions. More telling, even when people try hard to be faithful to the evidence, they often are unable to treat information evenhandedly, for affect and cognition are linked inseparably in cognitive architecture and information processes. Cognition is "hot" - affect becomes information in the decisionmaking calculus. This grant proposal suggests a series of experimental and computational tests of the theory of motivated political reasoning as applied to the evaluation of candidates and issues.