What Motivates Reasoning? A Theory of Goal-Dependent Political Evaluation
We thank Hunter Hamberlin and Victoria Potts for excellent research assistance. We also thank Antoine Banks, Amber Boydstun, John Bullock, Damon Cann, Jamie Druckman, Stanley Feldman, Greg Huber, Samara Klar, Cherie Maestas, Spencer Piston, John Barry Ryan, Mike Sances, Kathleen Searles, Sharon Stanley, Nick Valentino, and participants at the Yale American Politics Workshop, BYU CSED conference, New York Area Political Psychology Conference, and Michigan CPS workshop for comments on various drafts of this paper. Last, but certainly not least, we thank Milt Lodge and Chuck Taber for graciously sharing their study materials and inspiring us to pursue this research. We are lucky to have work like theirs to build upon.
Abstract
Rather than exhibiting bias or open-minded reasoning at baseline, we argue that information processing is motivated by whatever goals a context makes salient. Thus, if politics feels like debate, people will be motivated to argue for their side. If politics feels like deliberation, they will be motivated to seek consensus through open-minded processing. Results from three experiments demonstrate: (1) Politics evokes thoughts similar to conflictual contexts and dissimilar from deliberative contexts. (2) Consequently, information labeled “political” primes the motivation to counterargue, leading to opinion polarization. Absent such labeling, no such motivation is evident, explaining why bias is common but not inherent to politics. (3) Despite this capacity for bias, people can be motivated to actively process and accept counterattitudinal information by simply making the value of open-mindedness salient. This suggests open-minded discourse is possible even absent motivation to evaluate information accurately. We conclude by discussing the implications of our research for political discourse.
