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The US populace appears to be increasingly polarized on partisan lines. Political fissures bifurcate the country even on empirical matters like vaccine safety and anthropogenic climate change. There now exists an ever-expanding interdisciplinary research program in which theorists attempt to explain increases in political polarization and myriad other phenomena collected under the "post-truth" heading by appeal to social-epistemic structures, like echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, that affect the flow and uptake of information in various communities. In this paper, I critically analyze C. Thi Nguyen's important and popular analysis of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. As I demonstrate, the explanatory mechanisms on which Nguyen focuses are, arguably, overly cognitive and obscure significant effects of social-epistemic structures on our affective lives. The broader lesson to draw from my discussion is the following: commonly used expressions intended to refer to social-epistemic problems, like "political polarization", possess no univocal definition across theorists, and various ways of making the terms precise are differentially successful in characterizing verifiable phenomena. Theorizing about social-epistemic structures should be responsive to relevant empirical work on various phenomena that we have good reason to believe constitute real and substantive problems that result from the flow and uptake of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politics is rife with motivated cognition. People do not dispassionately engage with the evidence when they form political beliefs; they interpret it selectively, generating justifications for their desired conclusions and reasons why contrary evidence should be ignored. Moreover, research shows that epistemic ability (e.g. intelligence and familiarity with evidence) is correlated with motivated cognition. Bjørn Hallsson has pointed out that this raises a puzzle for the epistemology of disagreement. On the one hand, we typically think that epistemic ability in an interlocutor gives us reason to downgrade our belief upon learning that we disagree. On the other hand, if our interlocutor is under the sway of motivated cognition, then we have reason to discount his opinion. In this paper, I argue that Hallsson's puzzle is solved by adopting a Bayesian approach to disagreement. If an interlocutor is under the sway of motivated cognition, his disagreement should not affect our beliefs – no matter his ability. Because we implicitly and to high accuracy know his beliefs before he reveals them to us, disagreement provides us with no new information on which to conditionalize. I advance a model which accommodates the motivated cognition dynamic and other key epistemic features of disagreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People form beliefs of their own superiority relative to others to degrees that are implausible and statistically impossible. Is this the result of error in self or social judgment? We review evidence suggesting that people are more inaccurate when forecasting their own future prospects than when forecasting others. Moreover, we argue that such error when acting as a self rather than social psychologist is in part the result of biased visual experience. People orient visual attention and resolve visual ambiguity in ways that support self-interests. Because visual experience serves as one of the foundational stages of information processing, bias that emerges as people look at the world around them may propagate biased cognitive judgment without individuals' awareness of the presence or source of such bias. Motivated cognition may in part be the result of motivated perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amato MS, Shaw BR, Olson E, Turyk N, Genskow K, Moore CF. 2016. The challenge of motivated cognition in promoting lake health among shoreline property owners: biased estimation of personal environmental impact. Lake Reserve Manage. 32:386–391. Habitat loss through shoreline development on inland lakes threatens biodiversity. Property owners can reduce their impact by growing vegetated shoreline buffers, but many do not adopt these land management behaviors. One factor that may influence individuals' decisions to participate in conservation initiatives to promote natural shorelines is beliefs about their personal impact. A field study tested whether motivation to protect positive self-view would influence property owners' judgments about their shoreline's impact on lake health. Participants rated photos of their own property and other participants' properties on 4 dimensions: beauty, usability, water quality, and habitat. Linear mixed-effect modeling revealed photos were rated higher by their owners than other participants on all dimensions (mean β = 1.13,P< 0.05 for all), consistent with the hypothesis that motivation to protect self-view biased property owners to judge their own shoreline development as less harmful than it was judged by others. These results identify a potential barrier to outreach efforts for enlisting property owner cooperation in mitigating habitat degradation from shoreline development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces Dynamic Human-Centered Communication Systems Theory (DHCCST), defining communication as a complex dynamic system consisting of a human, a message, a medium, and a location. An argument is made that all elements of the system should be defined from a human centric viewpoint. The article reconceptualizes humans as evolved, embedded, embodied brains (EEEBs). Media are reconceptualized as brain-like creatures (BLCs). Communication is defined as the interaction of one or more EEEBs with other EEEBs or with BLCs. Medium of carriage and encoding system are reconceptualized along continua ranging from evolved to man-made. Examples of hypotheses arising from DHCCST are presented and some theories and effects are reinterpreted using this new perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]