The Routledge Handbook of Elections, Voting Behavior and Public Opinion by Justin Fisher Edward Fieldhouse Mark N. Franklin Rachel Gibson Marta Cantijoch Christopher Wlezien

Author:Justin Fisher,Edward Fieldhouse,Mark N. Franklin,Rachel Gibson,Marta Cantijoch,Christopher Wlezien
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317494805
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Bayes and motivated reasoning

In the context of politics and political information, motivated reasoning reflects the resistance and unwillingness of individuals to take political experience and political information at face value. People do not engage in an objective search for the truth when confronting new political events and new political information. To the contrary, they process new information and new experience within the context of their own political views, the most important of which are anchored in deeply held emotions and attitudes that have been reinforced over time. This tendency often means that they resist the information streams produced through print and electronic media, as well as through social communication, based on pre-conscious responses to political stimuli that they find repugnant or objectionable. Rather than being the objective evaluators of new information, they are the biased evaluators of the information streams they encounter based on their own particular preferences and viewpoints (Kunda 1990).

Who are the most likely to engage in motivated reasoning? In general, motivated reasoning is more likely among the most sophisticated – those who are more attentive, better informed, and hence more committed to their own viewpoints (Lodge and Taber 2013). Indeed, we would expect that a reasonable updating process would consider new information in the context of old information. That is, indeed, the primary democratic value typically cited in support of a wellinformed citizenry. One reason to educate the citizenry in a democratic political system is to ensure that voters are not swept along by fads, movements, and ephemeral causes. At the same time, carried to its extreme, motivated reasoning produces real problems for democratic politics.

Anti-democratic as well as democratic values carry the potential to generate motivated reasoning. Moreover, the sophisticated members of all tribes are susceptible: liberals and conservatives, radicals and reactionaries, Democrats and Republicans. All share the same human instinct – the more they know, the more confident they become in their own judgment, and the less likely they are to entertain new information. Indeed, as they become truly confident, their response to contrary arguments is likely to be anchored in a physiological rather than a reasoned response – patterns of association in long-term memory that might short circuit a deliberative response (Fazio 1995; Huckfeldt et al. 1998, 1999).

Is political polarization the ultimate result? We are persuaded by Bullock’s argument that there is nothing in Bayes’ theorem to suggest that either polarization or convergence is a necessary outcome of an updating process that reflects the weights placed on priors and new information. Indeed, our argument is that it is not the updating process or the priors that necessarily dictate the outcome of the process, but rather the nature of the individuals’ subjective levels of confidence, both in their own priors as well as in the incoming stream of new information to which they are exposed. The question remains: do subjective levels of confidence reflect the objective reality, which in this instance is the level of precision in priors and information streams?

In order for this to be

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