Climate Change and Covid-19: Testing for Motivated Reasoning

With climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic the world currently faces two dominant challenges that differ in their psychological distance and exhibit a wide public divide. One explanation for this divide is motivated reasoning. In this study, we shed light on the role of motivated reasoning in the context of climate change as well as the Covid-19 pandemic and try to disentangle directional and accuracy motivated reasoning. To this end, we conduct a large-scale survey among roughly 6,000 individuals in Germany and embed a treatment that is desinged to encourage accuracy seeking. In addition, we elicit a wide range of personality traits and attitudes toward climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic that allow us to determine the participants' prior beliefs and distinguish between `deniers' and `believers'. In particular, we aim at answering the following research questions: (1) First, to what extent are people directionally and accuracy-motivated? Second, using the psychological characteristics of the need to evaluate, preference for being right, and preference for consistency, as well as our treatment, we ask: Does accuracy seeking lead to less polarization than directional motivated reasoning in terms of (2a) a lower divergence in opinions and (2b) a lower likelihood in believing confirmatory and rejecting contradicting information? (3) Third, we investigate whether motivated reasoning is more prevalent when it comes to climate change or to the Covid-19 pandemic.