11/15/23: Motivated Reasoning

Festinger, again
● Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable!!!
● The desire to maintain cognitive consistency can lead people to process info in a biased
manner
● Directional goals prevail over accuracy goals
- Motivation guides processing
● Non-political examples?
- 1950s football study:
- Referee’s calls were viewed as correct when it favored one’s preferred
team

Directional goals
● The end goal motivates our cognitive processing
● In politics: accuracy goals vs. partisan goals
- Online processing: immediate, efficient, relies on overall tally or summary
evaluation
- Memory-based processing: thoughtful, cognitively draining, relies on file
cabinet-like search
● Motivated reason is a Broad Term!
- Best understood as a description of a process and not an explanation in and of
itself
- Need to identify the motive

Taber and Lodge (2006)

● Key component of motivated reasoning is affect: elicited automatically
- Outside of conscious control
● Affect then serves as a catalyst for biases processing
- Hot cognition: all political stimuli are affectively charged
- Also the logic behind the IAT
- Festinger’s theory doesn’t incorporate emotion

Thinking about thinking

● Is motivated reasoning part of System 1 (rapid) or System 2 (deliberate) processing?
- Heuristic vs. systematic processing / the rider vs. the elephant
- “Information congruent with expectations is easily assimilated since it requires no
effort to accept what one always knows is true. But incongruent information
interrupts normal processing and instead engages a process where some effort
 must be expended to make sense of the world. Thus, affect and cognition interact
for the motivated reasoner engaging in the evaluation of another person.”

Mechanisms
● Confirmation bias: people seek out information that confirms their prior beliefs
- Biased information search
● Disconfirmation bias: people avoid information contradictory to their prior beliefs
- Putting on blinders and discrediting
● Prior attitude effect: people who feel most strongly about an issue are those most likely to
engage in biased processing
- Identity-protection

Research
● Taber and Lodge (2006)
● Interactive, free choice information board
- Two issues: affirmative action and gun control
- Pre-survey measures of attitude position and strength
- Instructed to view info in an even-handed way so that they could explain the issue
to other students
● Figure 2: people tended to rate arguments congruent with prior beliefs as stronger,
arguments as incongruent with prior beliefs as weaker
- Especially true among political sophisticates / those with strong opinions
- Is this problematic?
● Figure 3: people with high political knowledge and strong attitudes toward the subject
spent more time reading incongruent arguments
● Figure 4: people (especially those high in political knowledge) more likely to denigrate
counter-attitudinal arguments
- Provided some substantive comments as well as affective reactions
- Backfire effect (mentioned later)

Applications
● Where do we see motivated reasoning play out today?
- Flat-earth dumbasses?

Effects in health politics

● Blanton and Gerrard (1997): linear trend perceived between risk of STD and prior
condom use/sexual history
- Woman A: 9 prior sexual partners, uses a condom 78% of the time
- Woman B: 32 prior sexual partners, uses a condom 27% of the time
- Guess who they said had a higher STD risk?
 ● Rational (homo economicus) judgment disappears when shown photo of attractive
woman, justification ensues
- Underestimate of motivated reasoning ‘in the heat of the moment’
● Smokers, caffeine drinkers downplay negative effects
● Basically, any potentially harmful habit can be reasoned or rationalized away
- However, motivated reasoning is weakened when people are asked to list positive
traits about oneself (self-affirmation condition)

Effects within public opinion

● So what? People have always engaged in confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias and
selective exposure
- What has changed is the way in which we consume information
- Narrowcasting: targeting messages to certain audiences
- Social media, fragmentation of news
● Are certain people more susceptible to motivated reasoning?
- Personality correlates? Issue dependent?

Our own realities

● Our preexisting beliefs skew our thoughts and influence our conclusions
- Objective facts can be called into question
- Explains why groups become polarized, even when faced with the same
unequivocal evidence
- Ex. climate change, vaccines, the birthplace of Obama, etc.
● How is this different from conspiratorial thinking?
- At what point does motivated reasoning become a conspiracy theory?
● How irrational is all of this?
- The alternative: disregarding an entire belief system, living in a constant state of
dissonance, being ostracized from the group

How long can we delude ourselves?

● Where does motivated reasoning end?
● How long can we go about dismissing incongruent information?
● When do partisan goals shift to accuracy goals?

The tipping point

● Redlawsk, Civettini, and Emmerson (2010)
● “Incongruent information is defined as any candidate attribute at odds with the subject’s
preferences. For example, if a subject was pro-choice, an incongruent piece of
information about a positively evaluated candidate would be that the candidate was
pro-life.”
 - Once about 13% of the info is incongruent, evaluations stop becoming more
positive
- Evaluations do not become more negative until about 28% incongruent
information is encountered

Corrections
● Fact-checking and the backfire effect
- When explicitly told WMDs were not found in Iraq and there was no link between
Saddam and 9/11, people were more likely to hold these beliefs
- What's up with this? Same as asking for advice only to reaffirm what you
already planned to do
● Accuracy goals vs. directional goals
- Trump voters acknowledge ‘factual infidelity’, social identity/hatred of outgroup
(negative partisanship) as more important than vote choice
- How important are alternatives in structuring/guiding motivated
reasoning?

Change my mind
● Confronting hot cognition
- “If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a
context that doesn’t trigger a defensive, emotional reaction”
- Possible given identity politics/tribal politics of today?
● Echo chambers
- To overcome directional processing, attitude change must come from within one’s
circle (in-group members)
- Allport’s contact hypothesis
● Effective corrections also reframe an issue rather than simply dismiss it as wrong,
intervene early to avoid the spread of a false narrative

11/27/23: Communication and Framing

Political communication
● Harold Lasswell
- Father of political psych
● Politics: “that thing which involves who gets what, when and how”
● Communication: “who say what, in which channel, to whom and with what effect”

Propaganda
● Lasswell was originally interested in Nazism, propaganda and deliberate manipulation of
mass public opinion
 ● Propaganda works via the manipulation and control of symbols or subjective
representations of perceptions of things
- Is propaganda always bad?

Agenda setting
● Planting of stories in media by policy-makers
● CNN effect: 24-hour media coverage influences U.S. involvement in foreign policy and
humanitarian crises
- CNN coverage of Somali famine -> public interest -> political response
- Still in effect today
● Helping and concern for others is a good thing!
- Manufacturing consent: widespread manipulation of the public via news media
(ultimately controlled by government officials)

Manufacturing consent
● Herman and Chomsky (1988): media operate/control/manipulate through five filters
1. Ownership
- Mass media firms are big corporations. Often, they are part of even bigger
conglomerates. Their end game? Profit.
- It’s in their interests to push for whatever guarantees that profit. Naturally, critical
journalism must take second place to the needs and interests of the corporation.
2. Advertising
- Media costs a lot more than consumers will ever pay. Who fills the gap?
Advertisers. What are the advertisers paying for? Audiences.
- It isn’t so much that the media are selling you a product (their output). They are
also selling advertisers a product (you!)
3. The media elite
- The establishment manages the media through the third filter. Journalism cannot
be a check on power because the very system encourages complicity.
- Governments, corporations and big institutions know how to play the media
game. They know how to influence the news narrative. They feed media scoops,
official accounts and interviews with the “experts.” They make themselves crucial
to the process of journalism. So, those in power and those who report on them are
in bed with each other.
4. Flak
- If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins. When the media
(journalists, whistleblowers, sources) stray away from the consensus, they get
“flak”.
- When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flak machine
in action discrediting sources, trashing stories and diverting the conversation
 5. The common enemy
- To manufacture consent, you need an enemy, a target. That common enemy is the
fifth filter.
- Terrorists, immigrants, etc. A common enemy, something to fear, helps corral
public opinion.
Priming
● Media priming is a process where the media attend to some issues and not others, thereby
altering the standards by which people evaluate candidates, policies, issues, etc.
- Often happens without conscious thought
- Subliminal or implicit priming occurs when stimuli are presented for less
than 500 milliseconds
- Sparks hot cognition

All the primes

● Draws upon associations/stereotypes in the mind
● Contextual or social priming
- Business materials increased competitiveness, money primes increased diligence
● Semantic priming
- Ex. respond more rapidly to the word ‘banana’ after being primed with the word
‘yellow’
● Racial priming
- Ex. Willie Horton ad
- Recall: racial resentment vs. principled conservatism
- Dog whistle politics: relates to a wide variety of coded messages
- Bad hombres, welfare queen, Barack Hussein Obama
● Primes work because/in spite of the fact that symbols and words mean different things to
different groups of people

Framing
● Political phenomena do not speak for themselves. We often rely on politicians and media
pundits to interpret them for us.
- Frames provide a way of thinking about a particular construct
- “Make the lines more pronounced”
● Agenda setting tells you what to think about, framing tells you how to think about it
- Ex. is abortion an issue of right to life or right to choice?

Research on words
● Democratic and Republican speeches looked mostly similar before the 1990s
● Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America
- “Tax relief”, “personal responsibility”, “taking back our streets”
 ● Throwback to Lakoff’s strict father/nurturant parent models
- “When you argue against the other side using their language, and quoting them,
then you’re helping them,” Lakoff said. “The ball is in their court, you’re playing
on their field, and you’re trapped.”

So what?
● Is this what we want from our media system?
- If not, how might we correct these effects?
- Social media as savior?
● What is our individual agency in combating agenda setting, priming and framing?
- Skepticism -> conspiratory thinking?
- Fact checking -> motivated reasoning?

11/29/23: The Roots of Conspiratorial Thinking

What are conspiracies?

● Rumors:
- A story or statement in general circulation without confirmation or certainty as to
facts
● Superstitions:
- Focused on one particular event or point in time
● Misinformation:
- False or misleading information
● Disinformation:
- False or misleading information spread to knowingly deceive people
● Non-falsifiable:
- Just as easy to deny as to confirm
- Conspiracies are simply narrative accounts of the world as individuals believe it
to be
- Most tend to encapsulate an overarching scheme among multiple actors who are
driven by a political or societal motive

Who are these people?

● A large portion of the population!
● In a 2013 report, 37% of respondents believed global warming is a hoax, 29% believed in
the existence of aliens, and 28% believed in a New World Order
● In 2020, 1 in 4 Americans agreed that COVID-19 was intentionally planned

Abnormal psychology?
● Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)
 - Belief in conspiracies as a type of psychological disorder, whereby individuals of
lower intellect could be swept away by fantasy and paranoia
- Ex. Red scare, McCarthyism
● Today, we know that most well-functioning people are capable of irrationality and errors
in reasoning
- Bounded rationality, satisficing and heuristics
- Illusory correlations
- Conjunction fallacy: overestimate of two events occurring together

Where it begins
● Conspiratorial thinking is borne out of situations of ambiguity
● One feels the need to make sense of their environment (epistemic motivation) and feel
safe/in control of their situational context (existential motivation)
● Ambiguity leads to cognitive dissonance
● “If we are indeed to portray conspiracy theorists as having one flaw, is it that they are
some of the last believers in an ordered universe.”

Individual-level correlates
● Belief in the paranormal
- Ex. astrology explains human behavior, full moon makes people act up
● Belief in pseudoscience
- Ex. vaccines cause autism, humans only use 10% of their brains
● Religiosity
- Jesus toast lol
● Cognitive style
- Need for certainty, need for closure, intolerance of ambiguity
● Lower levels of external efficacy
- Less trust in government
● Decreased political engagement
● The #1 predictor of belief in a given conspiracy = belief in another one

Situational factors
● Losing an election is the best foundation for conspiracy theories
- Trust in government fluctuates according to who is in power
● Conspiracy theories thrive in political instability, when the nation faces a collective
tragedy
- People feel betrayed by government officials and society
● Political polarization heightens conspiratorial thinking
- Vilifies political opponents and heightens emotions
● Leaks/investigations into legitimate government scandals encourage other conspiracies
 - Post Watergate, 80% of Americans believed some conspiracy theory about JFK’s
assassination

Conspiracies are for losers

● Belief in conspiracies is equally common:
- Within America and in other countries
- Among the less and more educated
- Among republicans and democrats
- Among men and women
● BUT … ideological or partisan extremists are typically more conspiratorial
- Social identity theory, the need to protect one’s worldview and group membership
● Electoral losers tend to adopt and spread conspiracies about the winning outgroup
- Ex. Obama birth certificate, January 6th insurrectionists

Power struggle
● Many modern conspiracy theories hinge upon issues of power, control and authority
● Conspiracies serve as a psychological buffer, a defensive tactic or an outlet for one’s
hostility
- Particularly when people feel anxious, powerless or otherwise not in a position of
control
● Belief in conspiracies tends to be greater among racial/ethnic minorities and those who
perceive greater economic inequality

Effects on democracy
● To what extent are conspiratorial beliefs dangerous to society?
- A healthy dose of skepticism? Reflective of a pluralistic citizenry?
- Yes, but these people are removed from political process
- Perhaps detrimental when attitudes become malicious actions
● Positive correlation between conspiratorial thinking and adherence to democratic values
- Huh???
- Maybe these individuals have high standards for what a truly democratic
government, free from corruption, should look like?
● Real harm comes when politicians perpetuate conspiracies
- Legitimizes their existence and influences public opinion
- Greater accountability for politicians who knowingly/unknowingly
communicate misinformation?