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© 2020 Elsevier Ltd A common inference in behavioral science is that people's motivation to reach a politically congenial conclusion causally affects their reasoning—known as politically motivated reasoning. Often these inferences are made on the basis of data from randomized experiments that use one of two paradigmatic designs: Outcome Switching, in which identical methods are described as reaching politically congenial versus uncongenial conclusions; or Party Cues, in which identical information is described as being endorsed by politically congenial versus uncongenial sources. Here we argue that these designs often undermine causal inferences of politically motivated reasoning because treatment assignment violates the excludability assumption. Specifically, assignment to treatment alters variables alongside political motivation that affect reasoning outcomes, rendering the designs confounded. We conclude that distinguishing politically motivated reasoning from these confounds is important both for scientific understanding and for developing effective interventions; and we highlight those designs better placed to causally identify politically motivated reasoning.

Significance Video is an increasingly common source of political information. Although conventional wisdom suggests that video is much more persuasive than other communication modalities such as text, this assumption has seldom been tested in the political domain. Across two large-scale randomized experiments, we find clear evidence that “seeing is believing”: individuals are more likely to believe an event took place when shown information in video versus textual form. When it comes to persuasion, however, the advantage of video over text is markedly less pronounced, with only small effects on attitudes and behavioral intentions. Together, these results challenge popular narratives about the unparalleled persuasiveness of political video versus text., Concerns about video-based political persuasion are prevalent in both popular and academic circles, predicated on the assumption that video is more compelling than text. To date, however, this assumption remains largely untested in the political domain. Here, we provide such a test. We begin by drawing a theoretical distinction between two dimensions for which video might be more efficacious than text: 1) one’s belief that a depicted event actually occurred and 2) the extent to which one’s attitudes and behavior are changed. We test this model across two high-powered survey experiments varying exposure to politically persuasive messaging (total n = 7,609 Americans; 26,584 observations). Respondents were shown a selection of persuasive messages drawn from a diverse sample of 72 clips. For each message, they were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a short video, a detailed transcript of the video, or a control condition. Overall, we find that individuals are more likely to believe an event occurred when it is presented in video versus textual form, but the impact on attitudes and behavioral intentions is much smaller. Importantly, for both dimensions, these effects are highly stable across messages and respondent subgroups. Moreover, when it comes to attitudes and engagement, the difference between the video and text conditions is comparable to, if not smaller than, the difference between the text and control conditions. Taken together, these results call into question widely held assumptions about the unique persuasive power of political video over text.

Partisan disagreement over policy-relevant facts is a salient feature of contemporary American politics. Perhaps surprisingly, such disagreements are often the greatest among opposing partisans who are the most cognitively sophisticated. A prominent hypothesis for this phenomenon is that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning-commonly defined as reasoning driven by the motivation to reach conclusions congenial to one's political group identity. Numerous experimental studies report evidence in favor of this hypothesis. However, in the designs of such studies, political group identity is often confounded with prior factual beliefs about the issue in question; and, crucially, reasoning can be affected by such beliefs in the absence of any political group motivation. This renders much existing evidence for the hypothesis ambiguous. To shed new light on this issue, we conducted three studies in which we statistically controlled for people's prior factual beliefs-attempting to isolate a direct effect of political group identity-when estimating the association between their cognitive sophistication, political group identity, and reasoning in the paradigmatic study design used in the literature. We observed a robust direct effect of political group identity on reasoning but found no evidence that cognitive sophistication magnified this effect. In contrast, we found fairly consistent evidence that cognitive sophistication magnified a direct effect of prior factual beliefs on reasoning. Our results suggest that there is currently a lack of clear empirical evidence that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning as commonly understood and emphasize the conceptual and empirical challenges that confront tests of this hypothesis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

© 2020 Elsevier B.V. A surprising finding from U.S. opinion surveys is that political disagreements tend to be greatest among the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans. Recent experiments suggest a hypothesis that could explain this pattern: cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing of new information. However, the designs of these experiments tend to contain several limitations that complicate their support for this hypothesis. In particular, they tend to (i) focus on people's worldviews and political identities, at the expense of their other, more specific prior beliefs, (ii) lack direct comparison with a politically unbiased benchmark, and (iii) focus on people's judgments of new information, rather than on their posterior beliefs following exposure to the information. We report two studies designed to address these limitations. In our design, U.S. subjects received noisy but informative signals about the truth or falsity of partisan political questions, and we measured their prior and posterior beliefs, and cognitive sophistication, operationalized as analytic thinking inferred via performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test. We compared subjects' posterior beliefs to an unbiased Bayesian benchmark. We found little evidence that analytic thinking magnified politically biased deviations from the benchmark. In contrast, we found consistent evidence that greater analytic thinking was associated with posterior beliefs closer to the benchmark. Together, these results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing. We discuss differences between our design and prior work that can inform future tests of this hypothesis.

Boyer & Petersen (B&P) argue that folk-economic beliefs are widespread – shaped by evolved cognitive systems – and they offer exemplar beliefs to illustrate their thesis. In this commentary, we highlight evidence of substantial variation in one of these exemplars: beliefs about immigration. Contra claims by B&P, we argue that the balance of this evidence suggests the “folk” may actually holdpositivebeliefs about the economic impact of immigration.

Prosociality is fundamental to human social life, and, accordingly, much research has attempted to explain human prosocial behavior. Capraro and Rand (Judgment and Decision Making, 13, 99-111, 2018) recently provided experimental evidence that prosociality in anonymous, one-shot interactions (such as Prisoner’s Dilemma and Dictator Game experiments) is not driven by outcome-based social preferences – as classically assumed – but by a generalized morality preference for “doing the right thing”. Here we argue that the key experiments reported in Capraro and Rand (2018) comprise prominent methodological confounds and open questions that bear on influential psychological theory. Specifically, their design confounds: (i) preferences for efficiency with self-interest; and (ii) preferences for action with preferences for morality. Furthermore, their design fails to dissociate the preference to do “good” from the preference to avoid doing “bad”. We thus designed and conducted a preregistered, refined and extended test of the morality preference hypothesis (N=801). Consistent with this hypothesis, our findings indicate that prosociality in the anonymous, one-shot Dictator Game is driven by preferences for doing the morally right thing. Inconsistent with influential psychological theory, however, our results suggest the preference to do “good” was as potent as the preference to avoid doing “bad” in this case.

Most people report that they are superior to the average person on various moral traits. The psychological causes and social consequences of this phenomenon have received considerable empirical attention. The behavioral correlates of self-perceived moral superiority, however, remain unknown. We present the results of two preregistered studies (Study 1, N=827; Study 2, N=825) in which we indirectly assessed participants’ self-perceived moral superiority, and used two incentivized economic games to measure their engagement in moral behavior. Across studies, self-perceived moral superiority was unrelated to trust in others and to trustworthiness, as measured by the Trust Game; and unrelated to fairness, as measured by the Dictator Game. This pattern of findings was robust to a range of analyses, and, in both studies, Bayesian analyses indicated moderate support for the null over the alternative hypotheses. We interpret and discuss these findings, and highlight interesting avenues for future research on this topic.

Affective polarization describes the phenomenon whereby people identifying as Republican or Democrat tend to view opposing partisans negatively and co-partisans positively. Though extensively studied, there remain important gaps in scholarly understanding of affective polarization. In particular, (a) how it relates to the distinct behavioural phenomena of in-party “love” vs. out-party hostility; and (b) to what extent it reflects a generalized evaluative disparity between partisans vs. a domain-specific disparity in evaluation. We report the results of an investigation that bears on both of these questions. Specifically, drawing on recent trends in political science and psychology, we hypothesize that moral polarization—the tendency to view opposing partisans’ moral character negatively, and co-partisans’ moral character positively—will be associated with behavioural hostility towards the out-party. We test this hypothesis in two preregistered studies comprising behavioural measures and large convenience samples of US partisans (combined N = 1354). Our results strike an optimistic chord: Taken together, they suggest that this association is probably small and somewhat tenuous. Though moral polarization itself was large—perhaps exceeding prior estimates of trait affective polarization—even the most morally polarized partisans appeared reluctant to engage in a mild form of out-party hostility. These findings converge with recent evidence that polarization—moral or otherwise—has yet to translate into the average US partisan wanting to express hostile and directly discriminatory behaviour toward their out-party counterparts.