Motivated Biases in Political Reasoning

在思考政治问题时，公民很少（如果有的话）是冷静的。他们不像理性决策的规范模型那样公正地对待有关政党、候选人或问题的信息，而是倾向于接受他们认同的事实和论点，而轻视或积极反驳那些挑战他们先入为主的观点。简而言之，公民的政治信仰往往是“党派化”的，他们的动机更多地是希望保持先前的信仰，而不是希望做出“准确”或其他最佳决策。更能说明问题的是，即使人们努力忠实于证据，他们往往也无法公正地对待信息，因为情感和认知在认知架构和信息处理中是不可分割地联系在一起的。认知是“热的”——影响成为决策演算中的信息。这项拨款提案建议对动机政治推理理论进行一系列实验和计算测试，以应用于候选人和问题的评估。

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.