Do People Engage in Motivated Reasoning to Think the World Is a Good Place for Others
Year: 2020
Type: preprint
Abstract: Motivated reasoning is a bias in inference in which people distort their updating process in the direction of more attractive beliefs. Prior work has shown how motivated reasoning leads people to form overly positive beliefs that also serve to bolster one's self-image in domains such as intelligence, prosociality, and politics. In this paper, I study whether positivity-motivated reasoning persists in domains where self-image does not play a role. In particular, I analyze whether individuals motivatedly reason to think that the world is a better place for others. Building off of the design from Thaler (2020), I conduct a large online experiment to test for positivity-motivated reasoning on issues such as cancer survival rates, others' happiness, and infant mortality. I find no systematic evidence for positivity-motivated or negativity-motivated reasoning, and can rule out modest effects. Positivity is not a sufficient condition for motivated reasoning.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Author: Michael Thaler
Institution: Princeton University
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3108305535