2025/01/01 by Fabian Hutmacher, Regina Reichardt, Marlene S. Altenmüller · 1 voice
Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics #Psychometric Methodologies and Testing #Social and Intergroup Psychology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1525/collabra.147252
Motivated reasoning denotes the phenomenon that individuals are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at. Properly understanding this phenomenon requires at least three things: first, to pin down the preconditions of motivated reasoning; second, to identify the cognitive processes that lead to biased judgments; and third, to identify whether a measured bias is the result of motivated reasoning or other processes. Although motivated reasoning has received continued attention from the research community over the last decades, there are considerable conceptual ambiguities regarding these three aspects. By focusing on key publications that have had a formative effect on the development of the field as well as recent publications that reflect the state-of-the-art, the present paper provides a concise and selective overview of research on motivated reasoning, discusses existing conceptual ambiguities, and derives recommendations for future research.