Motivated reasoning is an unconscious bias that’s associated with people who hold strong personal or ideological beliefs. According to one source, “motivated reasoning leads people to confirm what they already believe, while ignoring contrary data. But it also drives people to develop elaborate rationalizations to justify holding beliefs that logic and evidence have shown to be wrong. Motivated reasoning responds defensively to contrary evidence, actively discrediting such evidence or its source without logical or evidentiary justification. Clearly, motivated reasoning is emotion driven.”
fMRI Brain scans - speaking, finger tapping, listening
One observer notes that scientists have found that “one insidious aspect of motivated reasoning is that political sophisticates are prone to be more biased than those who know less about the issues. . . . . when we think we're reasoning, we may instead be rationalizing. We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers. Our ‘reasoning’ is a means to a predetermined end—winning our ‘case’—and is shot through with biases.”
What’s the evidence?: It’s fair to ask if there’s any tangible evidence that unconscious motivated reasoning bias is real. There is. In 2006, researcher Drew Westin and colleagues published a paper showing brain activity in committed political partisans during the 2004 presidential election (Bush’s re-election). The paper, Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 18, issue 11, pages 1947-1958, looked at implicit (unconscious) brain activity for information that was threatening to their own candidate, the opposing candidate or an individual who was neutral to the partisan.
The researchers summarized their results like this: “Research on political judgment and decision-making has converged with decades of research in clinical and social psychology suggesting the ubiquity of emotion-biased motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is a form of implicit emotion regulation in which the brain converges on judgments that minimize negative and maximize positive affect states associated with threat to or attainment of motives. . . . As predicted, motivated reasoning was not associated with neural activity in regions previously linked to cold reasoning tasks and conscious (explicit) emotion regulation.”
fMRI brain scanner (functional magnetic resonance imaging)
That was the first neuroimaging evidence for motivated reasoning, implicit emotion regulation, and psychological defense. The brain imaging data suggested that “motivated reasoning is qualitatively distinct from reasoning* when people do not have a strong emotional stake in the conclusions reached.” In other words, when partisans were presented with threatening information, they unconsciously reacted emotionally, not consciously.
* Meaning conscious thought or thinking about information that was positive or neutral for the partisan’s candidate – “cold reasoning tasks” and conscious emotion control.
Despite motivated reasoning’s power to distort perceptions of reality or facts and how we apply common sense to what we think we perceive, simply knowing about its existence can help the conscious mind reduce the distortions. Of course, doing that requires a will or mind set that’s motivated to reduce unconscious distortions.
It all boils down to one’s personal mind set. One libertarian partisan became aware of the distorting influence his own strongly held political ideology had on his perceptions of facts and his common sense in thinking about the facts. He described his experience like this: “Ever since college I have been a libertarian—socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility. I also believe in science as the greatest instrument ever devised for understanding the world. So what happens when these two principles are in conflict? My libertarian beliefs have not always served me well. Like most people who hold strong ideological convictions, I find that, too often, my beliefs trump the scientific facts. This is called motivated reasoning, in which our brain reasons our way to supporting what we want to be true. Knowing about the existence of motivated reasoning, however, can help us overcome it when it is at odds with evidence.”
Questions: Does being a responsible citizen come with a moral obligation to be aware of human biases and their tendency to distort reality and common sense so that they can try to reduce the distortion? Or, because facing unbiased reality is psychologically uncomfortable and threatening to personal self-image and self-esteem, there is no obligation for citizens to care about their own unconscious biases and to operate on the false belief that they in fact do not bias facts or common sense?
B&B orig: 10/27/16
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