Motivated reasoning is a phenomenon studied in cognitive science and social psychology that uses emotionally-biased reasoning to produce justifications or make decisions that are most desired rather than those that accurately reflect the evidence, while still reducing cognitive dissonance. In other words, motivated reasoning is the “tendency to find arguments in favour of conclusions we want to believe to be stronger than arguments for conclusions we do not want to believe”.
Human beings are not always — in fact, probably not often — the objective, rational creatures they like to think they are. In the past few decades, psychologists have demonstrated the many ways people deceive themselves every step of the way through the process of reasoning. Indeed, cognitive faculties are a distinguishing feature of humanity — lifting humankind out of caves and enabling the arts and sciences — nevertheless, they are also rooted in and subject to influence, or bias, by emotions and deeply ingrained instincts. One of the most significant ways information processing and decision-making becomes warped is through motivated reasoning, the bias toward a decision that conforms to what a person already knows, and it occurs outside of awareness that anything sneaky is going on.
Cognitive scientists see motivated reasoning as a force that operates in many domains. Studies by political psychologists highlight denial of global warming or discrediting its science as important examples of motivated reasoning; people process scientific information about climate shifts to conform to pre-existing feelings and beliefs. After all, accepting that climate change is real portends unpleasant environmental consequences and would require most people to head them off by making significant changes in lifestyle. Changing one’s mind and changing one’s lifestyle are hard work; people prefer mental shortcuts — in this case, having the goal fit their ready-made conclusions.
Why I Chose to research on motivated reasoning?
I have always been curious about the human psyche and what makes it tick. As someone has rightly said that “The best form of education is not by studying the various editions of books but by studying various editions of men.” Hence, I have always tried to decode the human behaviour and the biases that we carry. To this end I have read books like Snowball, The Art Of Thinking Clearly and the Black Swan. After reading these books and researching on decision making one thing that stood out to me was that while we are seeking evidence for confirming a certain theory, we are more likely to find evidence that confirms the hypothesis that we have in mind while we tend to ignore the evidence that suggests to the contrary. This is the entire premise of motivated reasoning where we try to prove our theories and find evidence for the same to confirm it rather than seeking the truth objectively.
This has huge repercussions for the business world, our daily life and the world at large. Major events like the stock market crash of 2008, the fraud of ‘Christ at Emmaus’, climate change etc. could have been prevented if only the leaders and experts could have been unbiased and not given to motivated reasoning.
Humans are emotional creatures and it is only natural that we act out of emotions and hence neglect the cold hard truth which is right in front of our eyes.
This piece of mine is an attempt to decode the human biases which propel motivated reasoning and how to prevent that from happening as almost all have fallen prey to this phenomenon at least once in life.
Being aware of this while making decisions can help people make prudent decisions in life and business leaders will make rational decisions for the good of the world rather than being biased.
Value In Reading This Article:
By reading this article we get an overview of motivated reasoning and what are the different circumstances in which we fall for lies and believe it to be the gospel truth as it aligns with our thoughts, beliefs and convictions. Reading this piece should help you be more discerning the next time you come across any piece of information, be it on social media, news channels, websites or your colleagues. One should not get dazzled by the information instantly but rather analyse whether there is any evidence to support the theory. If not then no matter how strong your beliefs about the subject, the information is a lie. But even before we try to find evidence on the matter, what we should do is first identify our feelings towards the subject being discussed. It is important to know how we exactly feel about the subject and then try to get rid of these biases and look at the entire subject with no biases in mind. A lot of these biases are subconscious and deep rooted. But identifying and penning down our emotions that we feel for a particular matter will help us rid our minds of the biases and this is paramount as clear decisions can only be taken when our brain is not clouded by blind reasoning.
Findings :
Let me start by recounting a famous story from history.
They called Abraham Bredius “The Pope”, a nickname that poked fun at his self-importance while acknowledging his authority. Bredius was the world’s leading scholar of Dutch painters and, particularly, of the mysterious Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.
When Bredius was younger, he’d made his name by spotting works wrongly attributed to Vermeer. Now, at the age of 82, he had just published a highly respected book and was enjoying a retirement swan song in Monaco.
It was at this moment in Bredius’s life, in 1937, that Gerard Boon paid a visit to his villa. Boon, a former Dutch MP, was an outspoken anti-fascist. He came to Bredius on behalf of dissidents in Mussolini’s Italy. They needed to raise money to fund their escape to the US, said Boon. And they had something which might be of value.
Boon unpacked the crate he had brought out of Italy. Inside it was a large canvas, still on its 17th-century wooden stretcher. The picture depicted Christ at Emmaus, when he appeared to some of his disciples after his resurrection, and in the top left-hand corner was the magical signature: IV Meer.
Johannes Vermeer himself! Was it genuine? Only Bredius had the expertise to judge.
The old man was spellbound. He delivered his verdict: “Christ at Emmaus” was not only a Vermeer, it was the Dutch master’s finest work. He penned an article for The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs announcing the discovery: “We have here — I am inclined to say — the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft. Quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer.”
He added, “When this masterpiece was shown to me, I had difficulty controlling my emotions.”
That was precisely the problem.
“Christ at Emmaus” was a monumental fraud of course and while the forgery was obvious to even an amateur art enthusiast a connoisseur like Bredius was fooled to motivated reasoning. The entire Dutch art world got drawn to this con and a dozen lost Vermeers were discovered in a few years which was incredulous as Vermeer painted mostly in the 1660’s and no more than 40 of his paintings were thought to have survived.
This just proves an epic instance of motivated reasoning where an expert of the level of Bredius was fooled by a fake which was quite apparent just because the appearance of this painting proved a very famous theory of Bredius. Since this theory was close to his heart he ignore the rest of the clear evidence that suggested the painting was forged. Even in an interview he had said that this Vermeer was unlike any other Vermeer paintings that he had seen.
That should have been hint enough!
This story proves that when experts of the calibre of Bredius can fall prey to motivated reasoning, any of us are capable of falling for a lie. There is no guaranteed method of keeping ourselves safe — except to believe nothing at all, a corrosive cynicism which is even worse than gullibility. But a simple habit of mind can be followed that I have found helpful. When you are asked to believe something — a newspaper headline, a statistic, a claim on social media — stop for a moment and notice your own feelings. Are you feeling defensive, vindicated, angry, smug? Whatever the emotional reaction, take note of it. Having done so, you may be thinking more clearly already as then you are aware if your stance about the subject being discussed and be wary of any pitfalls and lies that can colour your thinking.
Motivated cognition is best understood as a description or characterization of a process and not an explanation in and of itself. For a genuine explanation, we need to know, at a minimum, what the need or goal was that did the motivating (or directing) of the agent’s mental processing and the precise cognitive mechanism or mechanisms through which it operated to generate the goal-supporting perceptions or beliefs.
Examples of the goals or needs that can motivate cognition are diverse. They include fairly straightforward things, like a person’s financial or related interests. But they reach more intangible stakes, too, such as the need to sustain a positive self-image or protect connections to others with whom someone is intimately connected and on whom someone might well depend for support, emotional or material.
The mechanisms are also diverse. They include dynamics such as biased information search, which involves seeking out (or disproportionally attending to) evidence that is congruent rather than incongruent with the motivating goal; biased assimilation, which refers to the tendency to credit and discredit evidence selectively in patterns that promote rather than frustrate the goal; and identity-protective cognition, which reflects the tendency of people to react dismissively to information when accepting it would cause them to experience dissonance or anxiety. Identifying these more concrete and empirically established mechanisms and giving a plausible and textured account of how they are at work is critical; otherwise, assertions of “motivated cognition” become circular — “x believes that because it was useful; the evidence is that it was useful for x to believe that.”
To be sure, motivated cognition can make us stupid, but it is not a consequence of stupidity. Social psychologists and behavioral economists distinguish between two forms of reasoning: “System 1,” which is rapid, intuitive, emotional, and prone to bias, and “System 2,” which is more deliberate, more reflective, more dispassionate, and (it is said) more accurate. A long line of research in social psychology, however, shows that “motivated cognition” spans the divide — that is, that needs and goals can unconsciously steer not only rapid “gut” reactions, but also even more systematic forms of analysis that are thought to be examples of “System 2.” Indeed, some researchers have shown that expert scientists are at least sometimes prone to motivated reasoning — that they conform the performance of their reflective and deliberate evaluations of evidence to the desire they have to see exciting conclusions vindicated and disfavoured ones rejected. Scary stuff. And humbling (unless as a result of motivated reasoning we see evidence of its operation only in those who disagree with us — in which case, motivated reasoning makes us anything but humble).
Work on motivated cognition and political conflict tends to focus more on the need for maintaining a valued identity, particularly as a member of a group. It is certainly plausible that an individual would employ one or another of the mechanisms for motivated cognition to advance her economic interests. But the seeming inability of economic interests to explain who believes what on issues such as climate change, the HPV vaccine, one or another economic policy involving tax cuts or social welfare spending, and the like is in fact the motivation — as it were — for examining the contribution that identity-protective forms of motivated cognition are making.
Mind Map of irrational decision making:
