Between Dec 19, 2024 and Jan 2, 2025, datasets can be submitted to DRUM but will not be processed until after the break. Staff will not be available to answer email during this period, and will not be able to provide DOIs until after Jan 2. If you are in need of a DOI during this period, consider Dryad or OpenICPSR. Submission responses to the UDC may also be delayed during this time.

Browsing by Subject "Motivated Reasoning"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The (In)egalitarian Self: On the Motivated Rejection of Implicit Racial Bias
    (2016-10) Vitriol, Joseph
    White Americans widely endorse egalitarian values and strongly oppose hostile forms of racial prejudice, yet significant racial disparities persist in many important life domains. Unconscious, implicit forms of bias at the individual-level have been offered as one explanation for aggregate racial disparities. Research has identified strategies to increase prejudice-regulation and reduce implicit bias in applied contexts, but has neglected to consider various psychological obstacles to the successful implementation of these interventions. Across three studies in which I experimentally manipulated exposure to scientific information and personalized feedback about implicit bias, I examined one such obstacle: that evidence of implicit racial bias threatens individuals’ egalitarian self-concepts, and activates motivated reasoning processes that bolster the denial of implicit bias feedback and its influence on behavior. I also test several strategies to decrease defensive responding and attenuate motivated reasoning in this context. Results indicate that exposing White Americans to credible information on the science of implicit bias can increase awareness, but also risks backfire effects in the form of negative attitudes towards social science and increased racial stereotyping. Additionally, personalized implicit bias feedback reliably induced negative attitudes towards an instrument designed to measure implicit bias (i.e., IAT) and negative self-reported affect, but had no reliable influence on awareness. However, negative affect mediated the relationship between feedback and self-perceived bias, suggesting that personalized feedback can have indirect effects on awareness. Importantly, I also obtain robust evidence for the success of a simple pre-feedback intervention informing participants that implicit bias is common and fundamental to human cognition, but nonetheless malleable and subject to control. This collective bias intervention, when paired with personalized feedback, reliably increased self-perceived bias, belief in prejudice and discrimination, and more acceptance of and favorable attitudes towards the IAT. Across all studies, I find that the motivated rejection of implicit bias is consequential for prejudice-regulation, stereotyping, and public policy attitudes, and mediates the relationship between a broad range of individual differences (i.e., sociopolitical orientations, explicit racial attitudes, and egalitarian motivations) and these outcomes. Finally, defensive responding to implicit bias evidence and feedback was cognitively depleting, as indexed by the Stroop test, although impaired performance on this task was reduced among participants in the pre-feedback intervention. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this evidence for anti-bias interventions, models of prejudice-regulation, impression management strategies in the context of intergroup relations, and the study of racial attitudes and prejudice. I also consider the application of my results to political and legal contexts, and identify future directions for additional research.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Psychology of Legal Decision Making
    (2016-12) Pryor, Thomas
    This dissertation is organized into three chapters. They are all centered around the theme of whether the law, as a psychological construct, can encourage people to engage in unbiased, neutral decision making. Many empirical accounts of legal actors – both of elites and the mass public – demonstrate that legal decisions are often driven by people’s political beliefs. There is, however, comparatively little empirical scholarship that rigorously tests the mechanisms of legal cognition and whether the law can induce more normatively desirable decision making. My dissertation tackles this gap in the literature head-on. In the first chapter, I analyze legal decision making in lay people and law students and argue that thinking “like a judge” makes people more open to information that challenges their beliefs and preferences. In three experiments, I test whether a simple legal frame primes subjects to engage in “bottom-up” reasoning and dampens the effects of “top-down” or motivated reasoning. The results consistently indicate that subjects who are asked to think “like a judge” are less driven by their personal preferences than subjects in control groups. I obtain conflicted findings as to whether sophistication moderates that relationship but very strong results suggesting that even small amounts of legal training make subjects much more receptive to legal primes and better able to identify and be persuaded by strong legal arguments. The overall results suggest that the law, as a concept, can motivate people to set aside their personal convictions in order to get the “right” answer. I explore these findings within the broader literature of social cognition and their implications for political science’s account of judicial behavior. In the second chapter, I conduct an experiment to determine if legal decision making insulates people from pervasive forms of cognitive bias. The first chapter establishes that legal decision making encourages subjects to pursue accuracy goals and to be open to information and arguments that run counter to their personal policy preferences. In this chapter I test whether subjects who are asked to think “like a judge” will be influenced by legally irrelevant, affectively charged cues. I find that subjects in the legal treatment are just as influenced by a negative image prime as subjects in the control group, suggesting that while the law can encourage accurate decision making it is not a sufficient condition for engaging in “cool consideration.” I explore the implications of these findings within the broader literature on social cognition and judicial behavior. In the final chapter, I analyze the psychology of elite decision making and argue that Supreme Court justices engage in similar cognitive processes as the mass public. In particular, I posit that they may be subconsciously influenced by irrelevant information. To test this hypothesis, I track incidents of laughter during oral argument and demonstrate that, while controlling for other politically and strategically relevant variables, this positive but irrelevant stimuli can influence the justices’ votes. While not going so far as to conclude that attorneys should hone their stand-up routines, or that law is what the “judge had for breakfast,” I argue that the persuasive effect of laughter is evidence that the justices engage in a degree of automatic, subconscious processing when deciding on their cases. This serves as preliminary evidence that cognitive processes common to members of the mass public may drive elite behavior as well.