Motivated Reasoning and VoterDecision Making: Affect and Evaluation.

Recent work on voter decision making has suggested that our old cognitive-based information processing approaches need to be updated to consider the role affect plays in the updating of candidate evaluations. In particular, the idea that voters can dispassionately evaluate new information about candidates for whom they already have developed evaluations (that is, whom they already like or dislike) has been challenged by evidence of motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoners seem to stick to their evaluations even in the face of countervailing information. Studies by Lodge and Taber, Steenbergen, Meffert and colleagues and my own work have all shown attitude strengthening or polarization when voters encounter negative information about a liked candidate. By rational updating standards, a liked candidate for whom something disliked is encountered should then be liked less. But instead voters often seem to become even more supportive, counterarguing or otherwise discounting the new information. This paper reports on a series of ongoing studies using dynamic process tracing in a laboratory setting where subjects engage in a simulated presidential campaign, during which the affective value of the information they examine is manipulated in order to assess its effects on evaluation and updating. While we know that attitude strengthening occurs, we do not yet understand the mechanism and conditions in which it operates. In particular, this paper focuses on the question of how much negative information about a liked candidate must be encountered before the attitude strengthening function is overcome and voters adjust their evaluations to more accurately reflect the information that is encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]