Partisan Gaps in Political Information and Information‐Seeking Behavior: Motivated Reasoning or Cheerleading?

Motivated Reasoning, Political Information, and Information Literacy Education

The Influence of Partisan Motivated Reasoning on Public Opinion

Political parties play a vital role in democracies by linking citizens to their representatives. Nonetheless, a longstanding concern is that partisan identification slants decision-making. Citizens may support (oppose) policies that they would otherwise oppose (support) in the absence of an endorsement from a political party—this is due in large part to what is called partisan motivated reasoni...

Political Parties, Motivated Reasoning, and Issue Framing Effects

Issue framing is one of the most important means of elite influence on public opinion. However, we know almost nothing about how citizens respond to frames in what is possibly the most common situation in politics: when frames are sponsored by political parties. Linking theory on motivated reasoning with framing research, we argue not only that citizens should be more likely to follow a frame i...

Hot Cognition or Cool Consideration? Testing the Effects of Motivated Reasoning on Political Decision Making

Researchers attempting to understand how citizens process political information have advanced motivated reasoning to explain the joint role of affect and cognition. The prominence of affect suggests that all social information processing is affectively charged and prone to biases. This paper makes use of a unique dataset collected using a dynamic information board experiment to test important e...

Threats to Hope and the Motivated Reasoning of Product Information

Three studies find that when individuals become less confident that what they yearn for is possible (i.e., when hope is threatened) they engage in motivated reasoning related to products that purport to enable goal attainment. Specifically, they (a) selectively search for information from a product-favorable information source, (b) regard this information as more credible, and (c) are less disc...