---
title: Motivated reasoning
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/
description: Motivated reasoning is the tendency to evaluate evidence by whether its conclusion is welcome rather than by its quality.
section: Learn
---

![Illustration: a redacted-dossier collage of press photography, contact sheets and political crowds from multiple eras.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/hero-case-studies.jpg)

[Learn](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/) · Cognitive biases and heuristics

# Motivated reasoning

In brief

Evidence tends to be judged by whether its conclusion is welcome rather than by its quality; partisans do assess identical evidence differently, but how much of that reflects motivation rather than prior beliefs remains disputed.

On this page

- [In brief](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/#in-brief)
- [What the research shows](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/#what-the-research-shows)
- [Has it held up?](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/#has-it-held-up)
- [How it shows up in political messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/#how-it-shows-up-in-political-messaging)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Persuasion or manipulation?](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/#persuasion-or-manipulation)
- [Archive techniques that lean on this](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/#archive-techniques-that-lean-on-this)
- [Related topics](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/#related-topics)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/#sources)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/motivated-reasoning/#images)

On this page

*Area: [Cognitive biases and heuristics](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/cognitive-biases/) · Evidence:**moderate**([How we rate the evidence](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/evidence-ratings/)). Partisans reliably judge identical evidence differently, but how much of that is "motivation" rather than different prior beliefs is still disputed.*

## In brief

Motivated reasoning is the tendency to evaluate evidence by whether its conclusion is welcome rather than by its quality. People hold congenial claims to a lenient standard and uncongenial ones to a strict standard, usually without noticing. In politics, the conclusion people want is often the one their group holds, which is why the idea is sometimes called identity-protective cognition.

## What the research shows

Ziva Kunda's 1990 review set out the modern account [1]. She argued that people do not simply believe what they want. They reach the conclusions they want only when they can build what looks like a reasonable case for them, and the bias works quietly through which memories they search, which rules they apply, and how hard they look for flaws. People motivated to be accurate reason differently from people motivated to reach a particular answer.

A precursor is Hastorf and Cantril's study of a rough 1951 football game between Dartmouth and Princeton [2]. Students from each school watched the same game and "saw" different ones: more than half of Princeton students said Dartmouth had played dirty, against only about one in ten Dartmouth students.

![Aerial photograph of Princeton's Palmer Stadium filled with spectators](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/images/motivated-reasoning-palmer-stadium-1921.jpg)

*Palmer Stadium, Princeton, New Jersey, in 1921 (photographer unknown), the stadium where the Dartmouth–Princeton game of November 1951 was played. Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Princeton_-_Palmer_Stadium_(1).jpg). Public domain (published before 1931).*

Taber and Lodge brought the idea into politics [3]. In two experiments, participants rated arguments on affirmative action and gun control. They judged arguments that matched their prior views as stronger, spent more effort picking apart the opposing ones (a "disconfirmation bias"), and, when free to choose, sought out sources likely to agree with them. The effects were largest among people with strong prior attitudes and high political knowledge, and in that study mixed evidence left people's attitudes more extreme.

Dan Kahan and colleagues argue that this reflects identity-protective cognition: for an ordinary citizen, holding the "wrong" view on a charged issue can cost standing in their group, while getting the science slightly wrong costs almost nothing personally. In one experiment, participants interpreted the same table of numbers, described either as a trial of a skin-rash cream or as a study of a concealed-carry handgun ban [4]. With the skin cream, more numerate people did better. With the gun ban, answers split along political lines, and in the original study the split was larger among the most numerate. A related experiment showed people the same video of a protest, described either as an anti-abortion protest at a clinic or as a protest against the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy at a campus recruiting office. Whether viewers saw protesters blocking and intimidating people, or peacefully speaking, depended on their cultural outlook and on which cause they were told the protest was for [5].

## Has it held up?

The basic pattern, that people rate the same information more favorably when it supports their side, is well supported. Ditto and colleagues' 2019 meta-analysis pooled 51 experiments with more than 18,000 participants and found a reliable bias of moderate size (a correlation of about .25) [6]. Liberals and conservatives showed almost exactly the same average level of bias (.235 versus .255). Baron and Jost challenged this conclusion, arguing that the studies sampled were not representative and that some of what was counted as bias could be reasonable updating from different starting beliefs [7]. The debate over whether bias is symmetric remains open.

![Bar chart: average partisan bias of .235 for liberals and .255 for conservatives](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/images/psych-motivated-reasoning-ditto-meta-analysis.svg)

*Average partisan bias in judging identical evidence, by political side, across 51 experiments: .235 for liberals, .255 for conservatives. Drawn by FRAME from Ditto and others (2019) [6]. CC BY 4.0.*

That second point is the deeper dispute. Tappin, Pennycook and Rand argue that the two most common designs, swapping which side a finding favors or swapping which party endorses a claim, cannot by themselves show that motivation is at work [8]. A person who distrusts a party's leaders has a rational reason to discount a claim those leaders endorse, and a person with strong prior evidence for a view can reasonably demand more before abandoning it. Different priors can produce the same pattern that motivation would.

Some specific findings have not replicated well. A preregistered replication of the motivated numeracy study with about 3,000 participants did not find the predicted pattern in which more numerate people polarize more [9]. Guess and Coppock ran three large survey experiments and found no sign that counter-attitudinal evidence pushed people further away (the "backlash" that Taber and Lodge's polarization result suggested); people mostly moved a little toward the evidence, whatever their starting point [10]. Survey measures of partisan belief also contain some cheerleading: small payments for correct answers shrank partisan gaps on factual questions [11].

## How it shows up in political messaging

- **Economic perceptions, US.** Bartels found that party identification colored how Americans perceived objective conditions: in the late 1980s, many Democrats said inflation had risen under Reagan when it had fallen, and Republicans later said the deficit had risen under Clinton when it had fallen [11][12]. Messages praising or blaming "our" or "their" administration land on audiences already inclined to believe them.
- **Brexit identities, UK.** After the 2016 referendum, "Leaver" and "Remainer" became identities that shaped how people read economic news, in some respects more strongly than traditional party loyalty [13].

![Crowd holding Union and St George flags at a pro-Brexit rally outside the Houses of Parliament](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/images/motivated-reasoning-brexit-rally-parliament-2016.jpg)

*Pro-Brexit rally outside the Houses of Parliament, London, 23 November 2016, photograph by Bulverton. Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brexit_Campaigners_out_side_Parliament_November_2016.jpg). CC BY-SA 4.0.*

![Placard reading My nan remembers the war, how the hell have we forgotten, held above a crowd at a pro-EU march in London](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/images/motivated-reasoning-pro-eu-march-london-2017.jpg)

*Pro-EU march, London, 25 March 2017; the placard reads "My nan remembers the war. How the hell have we forgotten?" Photograph by Ilovetheeu. Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_Brexit_pro-EU_protest_March_25_2017_02.jpg). CC BY-SA 4.0.*

- **Crowd sizes, 2017.** Shown photos of the 2009 and 2017 US inauguration crowds, 15 percent of Trump voters, against 2 percent of Clinton voters, picked the visibly smaller 2017 crowd as larger [14]. The authors read this largely as expressive responding: saying what supports the side rather than what one sees.
- **Protest policing, across causes.** In the protest-video study, conservatives and liberals each saw more intimidation when the protest was for the other side's cause [5]. Campaigns that describe "our" demonstrators as peaceful and "theirs" as violent rely on this.

Messages built on [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) exploit the mechanism directly by turning doubt about a claim into disloyalty to the group.

## How to spot it

- The strength of a claim is argued from who holds it ("they would say that") rather than from its evidence.
- The same standard of proof is not applied when the parties are swapped. A useful test is to imagine the identical claim coming from the other side.
- Congenial studies are accepted at face value while uncongenial ones are picked apart on method.
- A message tells the audience that questioning it means leaving the group.

## Persuasion or manipulation?

Speaking to what an audience already values is ordinary persuasion, and presenting evidence in terms that do not threaten a reader's identity can help it get a fair hearing. It becomes manipulation when a message tries to make a claim immune to checking by tying it to group loyalty, when it applies a double standard to evidence it would reject from opponents, or when it chooses only the facts the audience will not scrutinize. Honest writing holds its own side's claims to the standard it sets for the other.

## Archive techniques that lean on this

- [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) — Identity fusion: recasts checking a claim as betraying the group, which switches on identity-protective reasoning.
- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/) — Card stacking: a one-sided pile of congenial facts meets little scrutiny from an audience that wants the conclusion.

## Related topics

- [Confirmation bias](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/confirmation-bias/) — Confirmation bias
- [Social identity](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/social-identity/) — Social identity
- [In-group favoritism](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/in-group-favoritism/) — In-group favoritism
- [Group polarization](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/group-polarization/) — Group polarization
- [Continued influence effect](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/continued-influence-effect/) — Continued influence effect

## Sources

1. Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. *Psychological Bulletin*, 108(3), 480–498.
2. Hastorf, A. H., & Cantril, H. (1954). They saw a game: A case study. *Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology*, 49(1), 129–134.
3. Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. *American Journal of Political Science*, 50(3), 755–769. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2006.00214.x
4. Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Dawson, E. C., & Slovic, P. (2017). Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. *Behavioural Public Policy*, 1(1), 54–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2016.2
5. Kahan, D. M., Hoffman, D. A., Braman, D., Evans, D., & Rachlinski, J. J. (2012). "They saw a protest": Cognitive illiberalism and the speech-conduct distinction. *Stanford Law Review*, 64, 851–906.
6. Ditto, P. H., Liu, B. S., Clark, C. J., Wojcik, S. P., Chen, E. E., Grady, R. H., Celniker, J. B., & Zinger, J. F. (2019). At least bias is bipartisan: A meta-analytic comparison of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives. *Perspectives on Psychological Science*, 14(2), 273–291. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617746796
7. Baron, J., & Jost, J. T. (2019). False equivalence: Are liberals and conservatives in the United States equally biased? *Perspectives on Psychological Science*, 14(2), 292–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618788876
8. Tappin, B. M., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2020). Thinking clearly about causal inferences of politically motivated reasoning: Why paradigmatic study designs often undermine causal inference. *Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences*, 34, 81–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2020.01.003
9. Persson, E., Andersson, D., Koppel, L., Västfjäll, D., & Tinghög, G. (2021). A preregistered replication of motivated numeracy. *Cognition*, 214, 104768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104768
10. Guess, A., & Coppock, A. (2020). Does counter-attitudinal information cause backlash? Results from three large survey experiments. *British Journal of Political Science*, 50(4), 1497–1515.
11. Bullock, J. G., Gerber, A. S., Hill, S. J., & Huber, G. A. (2015). Partisan bias in factual beliefs about politics. *Quarterly Journal of Political Science*, 10(4), 519–578.
12. Bartels, L. M. (2002). Beyond the running tally: Partisan bias in political perceptions. *Political Behavior*, 24(2), 117–150. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021226224601
13. Sorace, M., & Hobolt, S. B. (2021). A tale of two peoples: Motivated reasoning in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. *Political Science Research and Methods*, 9(4), 675–692.
14. Schaffner, B. F., & Luks, S. (2018). Misinformation or expressive responding? What an inauguration crowd can tell us about the source of political misinformation in surveys. *Public Opinion Quarterly*, 82(1), 135–147. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfx042

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Palmer Stadium, Princeton (1921) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Princeton_-_Palmer_Stadium_(1).jpg) | Public domain (published before 1931) |
| Bar chart: partisan bias by political side (Ditto and others 2019) | Drawn by FRAME from source 6 (`make_cognitive_bias_diagrams.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME |
| Pro-Brexit rally, Parliament (23 November 2016) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brexit_Campaigners_out_side_Parliament_November_2016.jpg), photograph by Bulverton | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Pro-EU march, London (25 March 2017) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_Brexit_pro-EU_protest_March_25_2017_02.jpg), photograph by Ilovetheeu | CC BY-SA 4.0 |

### Image gaps

The 2009 and 2017 inauguration crowd photographs used in the crowd-size study: no like-for-like pair from the same vantage point was found in an open collection, and hosting only one of the two would misrepresent the comparison, so they are cited, not hosted. Photographs of the 1951 Dartmouth–Princeton game were not verified as public domain.

## Techniques

[Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/) [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/)

## Related

- [Confirmation bias](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/confirmation-bias/)
- [Social identity](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/social-identity/)
- [In-group favoritism](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/in-group-favoritism/)
- [Continued influence effect](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/continued-influence-effect/)
- [Group polarization](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/group-polarization/)
- [Identity fusion](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/identity-fusion/)
- [Card stacking](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/card-stacking/)