Motivated reasoning

Motivated reasoning is the tendency for goals, preferences, or desired conclusions to shape how people seek, interpret, and evaluate evidence.

Confirmation bias: The tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information that supports existing beliefs. Motivated reasoning often favors evidence that confirms a desired conclusion.
Reasoning: The process of drawing conclusions or making inferences from information and premises. Motivated reasoning is a goal-shaped form of this broader process.
Political polarization: The divergence of political attitudes into opposing ideological positions. Partisan goals can shape how people assess claims and evidence about politics.
Bayesian inference: A method of updating the probability of hypotheses in light of evidence and prior probabilities. It provides a formal account of evidence updating against which biased evaluation can be compared.
Motivated numeracy: The finding that political preferences can affect how people interpret numerical information. It tests whether quantitative skill protects against goal-shaped interpretation.
Directional goals: Goals that favor reaching a particular conclusion rather than making an accurate judgment. They steer reasoning toward an outcome a person already wants.
Belief perseverance: The persistence of a belief after the evidence that initially supported it has been discredited. It shows how conclusions can outlast the evidence that produced them.
Partisan bias: Preferential evaluation of information that favors one's political party or side. It is a common setting in which desired conclusions guide evidence evaluation.
Cognitive reflection: The capacity to pause an intuitive response and consider a more deliberate answer. Deliberation can reduce some errors, but does not guarantee freedom from motivated goals.
Identity-protective cognition: Reasoning that favors beliefs aligned with an important social identity. It links motivated reasoning to the protection of group identity.

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