User:Aks163/Motivated reasoning

Motivated Reasoning
Motivated reasoning is a cognitive and social response, in which individuals subconsciously allow emotional and/or personal biases to affect how new information is perceived. Individuals tend to favor arguments that coincide with their current beliefs and reject new information that contradicts them, despite any evidence. Individuals may be seen drawing self-serving conclusions if the conclusions match previous biases.

Motivated reasoning is similar to confirmation bias, where evidence that confirms a belief (which might be a logical belief, rather than an emotional one) is either sought after more or given more credibility than evidence that disproves a belief. It stands in contrast to critical thinking where beliefs are approached in a skeptical and unbiased fashion.

It can lead to forming and clinging to false beliefs despite substantial evidence to the contrary. The desired outcome acts as a filter that affects the evaluation of scientific evidence and of other people.

Mechanisms

There are three main subconscious psychological mechanisms that can lead to Motivated Reasoning, such as Biased Information searching, Biased information assimilation, and disconfirmation bias. Biased information searching and biased information assimilation are similar but biased information searching is actively searching out information that validates one's preconceptions, while biased information assimilation is where one actively aligns their sources to support their perspective. Disconfirmation bias happens when individuals give little to no examination of evidence that contradicts their previous beliefs and instead unquestionably accepts information that aligns with their previous biases.

What's uploaded under mechanisms

Early research on how humans evaluated and integrated information supported a cognitive approach consistent with Bayesian probability, in which individuals weighted new information using rational calculations. More recent theories endorse these cognitive processes as only partial explanations of motivated reasoning but have also introduced motivational or affective processes. These processes illuminate the mechanisms of the bias inherent in cases of motivated reasoning. To further complicate the issue, the first neuro-imaging study designed to test the neural circuitry of individuals engaged in motivated reasoning found that motivated reasoning "was not associated with neural activity in regions previously linked with cold reasoning tasks [Bayesian reasoning] and conscious (explicit) emotion regulation". This section focuses on two theories that elucidate the mechanisms involved in motivated reasoning

Founders

Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster introduced the concept of motivated reasoning by examining the ways in which people's motivations can influence their information processing and decision-making. He proposed a model of motivated cognition that suggests people have a tendency to engage in a "seizing and freezing" process when processing information.

Current Research
Motivated reasoning may contribute to the disagreement about the scientific status of gender bias in student evaluations.

The study conducted by Pennycook and Rand involved three separate experiments that aimed to investigate the role of motivated reasoning in the spread and acceptance of partisan fake news.

In their study, Schaffner and Roche investigate the role of motivated reasoning in responses to economic news in a politicized environment