Personal proximity to an affliction can motivate endorsing fringe causal claims

Evidence

To understand this, we need to bring back the role of pre-existing worldviews and motivations. Robert De Niro has a child with autism. In response to the controversy surrounding the festival’s planned screening of Vaxxed, De Niro commented on Facebook: ‘Grace and I have a child with autism and we believe it is critical that all of the issues surrounding the causes of autism be openly discussed and examined.’ The observational equivalence paradox strikes again: was De Niro honestly motivated by a search for accuracy and truth and just poorly informed about the movie’s agenda, or were his opinions distorted by a deep-seated personal desire to understand the world in a certain way? — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 264

Categorization

• XREF: A live instance of the motivated-reasoning framework the reader has been tracking across chapters on belief and misinformation.