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Jettinghoff, William

University of British Columbia

Rationality requires unbiased reasoning to produce accurate beliefs, but people appear routinely biased towards believing what they want, even if inaccurate (i.e., motivated reasoning). What makes motivated reasoning so common if it is so irrational? Traditionally, psychologists have assumed that people are committed to empiricism and unanimously disapprove of motivated reasoning, and that therefore motivated reasoning must happen unconsciously. A newer perspective tries to dissolve the issue by arguing that we can reinterpret many apparent cases of “motivated” reasoning as rational Bayesian cognition. This perspective argues that it is perfectly reasonable to treat a new piece of information with more scrutiny if it contradicts a large body of prior evidence, and thus when we observe people being more skeptical of information they disagree with, they are not necessarily being unreasonably “motivated”. In my dissertation, I will challenge both of these views: The first four studies challenge the Bayesian alternative, showing that people are not only skeptical of high quality information that challenges their preferred beliefs, but also willing to elevate low quality information (e.g., anecdotes, a single non-expert’s opinion) to the status of evidence when they are favorable to their preferred beliefs. The next four studies challenge the view that people universally disapprove of motivated reasoning by directly asking them about their ethics of belief: these studies reveal that many people actually approve of social, emotional, and especially moral goals guiding their empirical reasoning in addition to accuracy. Moreover, people acted in line with what they reported approving of: Participants who disapproved of social and emotional bias did not show signs of a self-serving bias, while approvers of social and emotional bias did. A final pair of experiments finds that even empiricist participants selectively elevate anecdotes to the status of evidence when given a moral motive.

Text

2025-03-06

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90467

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/