Survey: What Beliefs Are People Motivated to Hold?

This graph shows the share of respondents that believe people would engage in motivated reasoning in order to trust Good News or Bad News, Pro-Party or Anti-Party news, and Pro-Performance or Anti-Performance news. Respondents are not statistically significantly more likely to predict that people motivatedly reason in Positive directions than in Negative directions, but significant majorities expect motivated reasoning towards Pro-Party and Pro-Performance news.

Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.