Motivated reasoning engages different brain circuitry than neutral reasoning.
Evidence
Motivated reasoning has also been studied by neuroscientists, who have found that when our reasoning is colored by affective content a different part of our brain is engaged. When thirty committed political partisans were given a reasoning task that threatened their own candidate—or hurt the opposing candidate—a different part of their brain lit up (as measured by a functional-MRI scan) than when they were asked to reason about neutral content. It is perhaps unsurprising that our cognitive biases would be instantiated at the neural level, but this study provided the first experimental evidence of such differential function for motivated reasoning. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 103
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Retractions fail partly because the brain engages model-updating less when corrections challenge prior beliefs — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 279; Motivational reasoning biases perception without requiring conscious wishful thinking; Motivated reasoning is the motive while confirmation bias is the mechanism — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 100 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Motivational reasoning biases perception without requiring conscious wishful thinking
#expands(0.85) - Cognitive biases are hardwired parts of human brains rather than avoidable mistakes.
#expands(0.80) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 115 - Neural decision correlates appear only in frontal cortex, not auditory cortex
#complicates(0.78) - Choice-related cortical activity may only reflect top-down feedback rather than causal involvement
#qualifies(0.75) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4885 - Motivated reasoning is the motive while confirmation bias is the mechanism
#expands(0.72) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 100