Motivated Reasoning by Party and Prior

The y-axis measures motivated reasoning. Bayesians would set P(True), Demeaned = 0 for all news types.

This graph shows that motivated reasoning is more severe for news that reinforces the direction that people's political beliefs are already biased in, even controlling for whether the news is "Pro-Party" or "Anti-Party". It also shows that this effect is not seen on neutral topics, suggesting that people have formed biased political beliefs exactly because they have motivatedly reasoned from past signals.

Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.