Cognitive Biases in Politics
How the full spectrum of cognitive biases — from tribalism to motivated reasoning — distorts political judgment and polarizes democracies.
Motivated Reasoning: Thinking Like a Lawyer
Motivated reasoning is the tendency to process information in a way that supports conclusions you already want to reach. When confronted with evidence about a political issue, people do not evaluate it neutrally — they evaluate it like a lawyer, looking for reasons to accept evidence that supports their side and reasons to reject evidence that challenges it.
Dan Kahan at Yale has shown that motivated reasoning actually increases with education and cognitive ability. Smarter people are not better at evaluating political evidence — they are better at constructing sophisticated justifications for their pre-existing beliefs. This is profoundly counterintuitive: more education does not reduce political bias; it may increase the capacity for motivated reasoning.
