Debiasing Motivated Reasoning: Unpacking Mechanisms

Motivated reasoning, the tendency to selectively interpret information in ways that support beliefs people would rather hold, is a pervasive phenomenon that has been shown to contribute to belief biases, political polarization and excessive trust in ``fake news.'' In this project, we will experimentally study whether feedback interventions can induce people to become less susceptible to motivated reasoning and improve the accuracy of how they update beliefs. In particular, we test the effects of giving people two forms of feedback that increase their awareness when they incorrectly assess the truthfulness of a piece of news. Treatment A tells them about the costs of their inaccurate assessment, and Treatment B has people introspect about whether the bias of motivated reasoning impacted their assessment. We will test whether these interventions lead people to change how they process information about news on subsequent political issues. We will analyze whether they induce people to become less biased, more accurate, and less polarized about how they process future pieces of news.