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This study will aim to replicate finding from Study 2 from Bastian et al. (2012) that motivated-cognition processes make people rate the mental capacities of animals (lambs and cows) as comparatively lower when they learn that these animals are bred for human consumption and will be slaughtered. Besides directly replicating Study 2 from Bastian et al., 2012, we also aim to extend this study by testing whether the effect of motivated cognition is moderated by meat-eating; we expect that motivated-cognition effect should be stronger in persons who eat meat. References Bastian, B., Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., & Radke, H. R. M. (2012). Don’t Mind Meat? The Denial of Mind to Animals Used for Human Consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(2), 247–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167211424291

This study aims to test the theoretical model proposed by Bashshur, Fortin and Barclay (Under Review) that proposes the instrumental role of motivated cognition in justice perception.

An examination of the identification, ascription, and reception of 'fake news' across the ideological spectrum.

An examination of the identification and reception of 'fake news' across the ideological spectrum.

Individuals encounter, and are required to process, vast amounts of information daily. Whilst it would be rational to presume information given to a group of individuals would result in similar reasoning outcomes, this does not always occur (Cook & Lewandowsky, 2016). In fact, factors such as religious beliefs, political persuasions, or views about how society should operate, can influence whether or not, and to what extent, one chooses to believe information (Cook & Lewandowsky, 2016; Kahan et al., 2012). This reflects a concept referred to as belief polarisation (Cook & Lewandowsky, 2016). Belief polarisation is common with contentious topics, particularly those accompanied by risk, such as climate change (Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017; Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Oberauer, 2013; Lewandowsky & Oberauer, 2016). Scientific knowledge is thought to increase acceptance of scientific facts (Allum, Sturgis, Tabourazi, & Brunton-Smith, 2008; Kahan et al., 2012). However, for controversial issues which tend to elicit belief polarisation, attitudes among some individuals become inconsistent with the scientific evidence as scientific knowledge increases (Drummond & Fischhoff, 2017; Drummond, Palmer, & Sauer, 2016; Kahan et al., 2012, 2017; Motta, 2018, 2019). Higher levels of scientific knowledge have been associated with greater acceptance or concern amongst progressives on topics such as climate change, but less acceptance or concern amongst conservatives (Kahan et al., 2012). Recent evidence suggests that positive attitudes towards science may protect against the influence of prior political and social beliefs, and lead to increased acceptance of scientific information (Drummond & Fischhoff, 2017; Drummond et al., 2016; Kahan, Landrum, Carpenter, Helft, & Jamieson, 2017; Motta, 2018, 2019). Drummond and colleagues (2016) identified a factor termed 'endorsement of scientific inquiry' (ESI; the extent to which scientific research is viewed as a sound basis for knowledge) which counteracted the effects of worldview on support for pro-environmental policies. Two studies found that both existing levels of ESI and an intervention to increase ESI were related to increased policy support, independent of worldview (Drummond et al., 2016). The current study will aim to test whether an intervention designed to increase ESI can actually increase ESI, in turn replicating the findings of Drummond and colleagues (2016). Furthermore, we will investigate whether increases in ESI are associated with better evaluation of evidence for climate policies, demonstrated by a greater difference in support for policies accompanied by weaker and stronger evidence. This association was found in a previous (unpublished) project in 2019 by Hughes and Palmer. We will also test whether the relationship between ESI and evaluation of evidence is moderated by worldview.

An examination of the identification, ascription, and reception of 'fake news' across the ideological spectrum.

Individuals encounter, and are required to process, vast amounts of information daily. Whilst it would be rational to presume information given to a group of individuals would result in similar reasoning outcomes, this does not always occur (Cook & Lewandowsky, 2016). In fact, factors such as religious beliefs, political persuasions, or views about how society should operate, can influence whether or not, and to what extent, one chooses to believe information (Cook & Lewandowsky, 2016; Kahan et al., 2012). This reflects a concept referred to as belief polarisation (Cook & Lewandowsky, 2016). Belief polarisation is common with contentious topics, particularly those accompanied by risk, such as climate change (Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017; Lewandowsky, Gignac, & Oberauer, 2013; Lewandowsky & Oberauer, 2016). Scientific knowledge is thought to increase acceptance of scientific facts (Allum, Sturgis, Tabourazi, & Brunton-Smith, 2008; Kahan et al., 2012). However, for controversial issues which tend to elicit belief polarisation, attitudes among some individuals become inconsistent with the scientific evidence as scientific knowledge increases (Drummond & Fischhoff, 2017; Drummond, Palmer, & Sauer, 2016; Kahan et al., 2012, 2017; Motta, 2018, 2019). Higher levels of scientific knowledge have been associated with greater acceptance or concern amongst progressives on topics such as climate change, but less acceptance or concern amongst conservatives (Kahan et al., 2012). Recent evidence suggests that positive attitudes towards science may protect against the influence of prior political and social beliefs, and lead to increased acceptance of scientific information (Drummond & Fischhoff, 2017; Drummond et al., 2016; Kahan, Landrum, Carpenter, Helft, & Jamieson, 2017; Motta, 2018, 2019). Drummond and colleagues (2016) identified a factor termed 'endorsement of scientific inquiry' (ESI; the extent to which scientific research is viewed as a sound basis for knowledge) which counteracted the effects of worldview on support for pro-environmental policies. Two studies found that both existing levels of ESI and an intervention to increase ESI were related to increased policy support, independent of worldview (Drummond et al., 2016). The current study will aim to test whether an intervention designed to increase ESI can actually increase ESI, in turn replicating the findings of Drummond and colleagues (2016). Furthermore, we will investigate whether increases in ESI are associated with better evaluation of evidence for climate policies, demonstrated by a greater difference in support for policies accompanied by weaker and stronger evidence. This association was found in a previous (unpublished) project in 2019 by Hughes and Palmer. We will also test whether the relationship between ESI and evaluation of evidence is moderated by worldview. This study is a replication of a previously pre-registered study (osf.io/wpg42), as the crucial indirect effect of treatment on policy support through ESI was just above levels of significance, which was contrary to findings from Drummond and colleagues (2016). This replication will aim to clarify the effects of the treatment on ESI and policy support.

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In this study, we want to assess how showing participants an extreme opinion from an opposing party member influences how they subsequently interpret non-political information (about COVID-19 precautions) coming from an opposing member of the political elite.

How do people update their impressions of close others? Although people may be motivated to maintain their positive impressions, they may also update their impressions when their expectations are violated (i.e. prediction error). Combining neuroimaging and computational modeling, we test the hypothesis that brain regions associated with theory of mind, especially right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), underpin both motivated impression maintenance and impression updating evoked by prediction error. Participants had money either given to or taken away from them by a friend or a stranger and were then asked to rate each partner on trustworthiness and closeness across trials. Overall, participants engaged in less impression updating for friends vs strangers. Decreased rTPJ activity in response to a friend’s negative behavior (taking money) was associated with reduced negative updating and increased positive ratings of the friend. However, to the extent that participants did update their impressions (more negative ratings) of friends, this behavioral pattern was explained by greater prediction error and greater rTPJ activity. These findings suggest that rTPJ recruitment represents the integration of prediction error signals and the capacity to overcome people’s motivation to maintain positive impressions of friends in the face of conflicting evidence.

When the costs of acquiring knowledge outweigh the benefits of possessing it, ignorance is rational. In this paper I clarify and explore a related but more neglected phenomenon: cases in which ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it. The paper has four aims. First, I describe the psychological and social factors underlying this phenomenon of motivated ignorance. Second, I describe those conditions in which it is instrumentally rational. Third, I draw on evidence from the social sciences to argue that this phenomenon of rational motivated ignorance plays an important but often unappreciated role in one of the most socially harmful forms of ignorance today: voter ignorance of societal risks such as climate change. Finally, I consider how to address the high social costs associated with rational motivated ignorance.

Congenial information is often judged to be more valid than uncongenial (but otherwise equivalent) information. The present research explores a related possibility concerning the process by which people label a claim as fundamentally factual (open to proof or disproof) or opinion (a matter of personal preference not amenable to falsification). Rather than merely being more skeptical of uncongenial claims, uncongenial claims may be metacognitively categorized as more opinion than factual, while congenial claims may be more likely to be categorized as factual. The two studies reported here attempt to trace a preliminary outline of how claims are categorized as fact, opinion, or some mix of the two in the context of mundane claims, contentious political issues, and conspiracy theories. The findings suggest that claims are more likely to be labeled factual (and, to a lesser extent, are less likely to be labeled opinion) to the extent that one subjectively agrees with the content of the claim. Conspiracy theories appear to occupy a middle-ground between fact and opinion. This metacognitive approach may help shed light on popular debate about conspiracy theories, as well as seemingly intractable political disagreements more generally, which may reflect fundamental differences in the perceived epistemic foundations of claims rather than simple disagreement over the facts of the matter. Given limitations of the stimuli and participant samples, however, it remains to be seen how generalizable these findings are.

We propose a simple model of borrower optimism in competitive lending markets with asymmetric information. Borrowers in our model engage in self-deception to arrive at a belief that optimally trades off the anticipatory utility benefits and material costs of optimism. Lenders' contract design shapes these benefits and costs. The model yields three key results. First, the borrower's motivated cognition increases her material welfare, regardless of whether or not she ends up being optimistic in equilibrium. Our model thus helps explain why wishful thinking is not driven out of markets. Second, in line with empirical evidence, a low cost of lending and a booming economy lead to optimism and the widespread collateralization of loans. Third, equilibrium collateral requirements may be inefficiently high.

Free will is often appraised as a necessary input to for holding others morally or legally responsible for misdeeds. Recently, however, Clark and colleagues (2014), argued for the opposite causal relationship. They assert that moral judgments and the desire to punish motivate people’s belief in free will. In three experiments—two exact replications (Studies 1 & 2b) and one close replication (Study 2a) we seek to replicate these findings. Additionally, in a novel experiment (Study 3) we test a theoretical challenge derived from attribution theory, which suggests that immoral behaviors do not uniquely influence free will judgments. Instead, our nonviolation model argues that norm deviations, of any kind—good, bad, or strange—cause people to attribute more free will to agents, and attributions of free will are explained via desire inferences. Across replication experiments we found no evidence for the original claim that witnessing immoral behavior causes people to increase their belief in free will, though we did replicate the finding that people attribute more free will to agents who behave immorally compared to a neutral control (Studies 2a & 3). Finally, our novel experiment demonstrated broad support for our norm-violation account, suggesting that people’s willingness to attribute free will to others is malleable, but not because people are motivated to blame. Instead, this experiment shows that attributions of free will are best explained by people’s expectations for norm adherence, and when these expectations are violated people infer that an agent expressed their free will to do so.

The Gateway Belief Model describes a process of attitudinal change where a shift in people's perception of the scientific consensus on an issue leads to subsequent changes in their attitudes which in turn predict changes in support for public action. In the current study, we present the first large-scale confirmatory replication of the GBM. Specifically, we conducted a consensus message experiment on a national quota sample of the US population (N = 6,301). Results support the mediational hypotheses of the GBM: an experimentally induced change in perceived scientific consensus causes subsequent changes in cognitive (belief) and affective (worry) judgments about climate change, which in turn are associated with changes in support for public action. The scientific consensus message also had a direct effect on support for public action. We further found an interaction with both political ideology and prior attitudes such that conservatives and climate change disbelievers were more likely to update their beliefs toward the consensus. We discuss the model's theoretical and practical implications, including why conveying scientific consensus can help reduce politically motivated reasoning.

For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for moral responsibility than participants who were asked about moral responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments-and only when the descriptions had moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and moral responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed.

Americans are the world’s best armed citizens and public polling suggests protection/self-defense is their main reason for gun ownership. However, there is virtually no psychological research on gun ownership. The present article develops the first psychological process model of defensive gun ownership—specifically, a two-component model that considers both the antecedents and consequences of owning a gun for protection/self-defense. We demonstrate that different levels of threat construal—the specific perceived threat of assault and a diffuse threat of a dangerous world—independently predict handgun ownership; we also show how utility judgments can explain the motivated reasoning that drives beliefs about gun rights. We tested our model in two independent samples of gun owners (total N = 899), from just before and after the Orlando mass shooting. This study illustrates how social-cognitive theories can help explain what motivates Americans to own handguns and advocate for broad rights to carry and use them.

Previous research has identified need for closure (NFC) as an important motivational cognitive basis of authoritarianism and prejudice. However, to date, the role of NFC in the\ud intergenerational similarity in authoritarianism and prejudice has remained unclear. In a sample of 169 parent-child dyads, we investigated the similarity between parents and children\ud in NFC and tested whether this intergenerational similarity may account for the intergenerational similarity in authoritarianism and anti-immigrant prejudice. Our results revealed that parental levels of NFC were indeed concordant with the levels of NFC in their\ud children. Even more importantly, parental NFC was indirectly related to child authoritarianism and prejudice in two ways. The first pathway proceeded through the direct\ud relationships between parental and children’s levels of authoritarianism and prejudice. The\ud second pathway, however, bypassed parental levels of authoritarianism and prejudice and\ud proceeded through the intergenerational similarity in NFC. Our findings thus indicate that a\ud significant portion of children’s levels of authoritarianism and anti-immigrant prejudice can\ud be explained by parents–child similarity in motivated cognition. Implications for developmental theories of prejudice acquisition are discussed.

Sometimes social influence processes are the driving force behind the creation of new products, services, and modes of conduct. In this paper we argue that minority dissent and its ensuing influence provides an example par excellence, and we reviewed and interpret findings on minority influence and creativity in terms of the motivated information processing in groups model (MIP‐G model; De Dreu et al., 2008). In essence, we argue that minority dissent produces creativity and innovation when majority members have (a) high rather than low epistemic motivation and concomitant willingness to engage in deep and deliberate processing of information, and (b) a pro‐social motivation and focus on group successes rather than personal outcomes. Evidence from both laboratory and organizational field research is discussed and practical implications as well as avenues for further research are highlighted. Preparation of this article was facilitated by a 6th framework Network of Excellence EU‐Grant (SUS.DIV) awarded to ...

Interpreting ambiguous situations is not a purely data-driven process but can be biased towards positive interpretations by top-down influences. The present study tries to identify the underlying processes of these top-down influences. There are two separable types of processes that can be influenced by motivational biases: A perceptual bias affects information uptake whereas a judgmental bias affects acceptance criteria for positive and negative outcomes. In the present study, motivated influences on perception and judgment were investigated with a simple color discrimination task in which ambiguous stimuli had to be classified according to their dominating color. One of two colors indicated a financial gain or a loss, whereas a third color was neutral. To separate perceptual and judgmental biases, Ratcliff’s [Ratcliff, R. (1978). A theory of memory retrieval. Psychological Review, 85 , 59–108] diffusion model was employed. Results revealed motivational influences on perception and judgment.

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. Women's relatively worse performance in negotiation is often cited as an explanation for gender differences in advancement and pay within organizations. We review key findings from the past twenty years of research on gender differences in negotiation. Women do underperform relative to men in negotiation, but only under limited circumstances, which means the performance gap is unlikely due to lesser skills on their part. The barriers between women and negotiation excellence are of three types: cognitive, motivational, and paradigmatic. Cognitive barriers stem from negative stereotypes about women's negotiating abilities. Motivational barriers stem from desire to prevent women negotiators from excelling in a masculine domain. Paradigmatic barriers stem from how negotiation is currently studied. We call for greater attention to motivational barriers and for changes to the negotiation paradigm. Women negotiators are not incompetent, and training them to negotiate more like men is not obviously the solution. In fact, women have greater concern for others than men do, and their cooperativeness elevates collective intelligence and enables ethical behavior. Under a new paradigm of negotiation, the value of these strengths could become more readily apparent. In particular, we advocate for greater attention to long-term relationships, subjective value, and relational capital, all of which may have important economic implications in real world negotiations.

A ring-model of vicious cycles in customer-employee-interaction is proposed: Service employees perceive complaints as a threat to their self-esteem resulting in defense responses such as an increased need for cognitive closure, a devaluation of the customer and their information and degrading service behavior. Confronted with such degrading service behavior, customers react defensively as well, by devaluing the employee for example with regard to his/her competence and by reducing repurchase and positive word-of-mouth. Three studies investigated each link in this ring-model. In study 1, participants were confronted with an aggressive or neutral customer complaint. Results show that motivated closed-mindedness (one aspect of the need for cognitive closure) increases after an aggressive complaint leading to a devaluation of the customer and their information, and in turn to a degrading service reaction. In study 2, participants were confronted with a degrading or favorable service reaction. Results show that they devaluate the employees’ competence after receiving a degrading service reaction and thus reduce their intention to repurchase. In study 3, we finally examined our predictions investigating real customer-employee-interactions: We analyzed data from an evaluation study in which mystery callers tested the service hotline of an airline. Results show that the employees’ competence is devaluated after degrading behavior and thus reduces positive word-of-mouth.