UC Santa Barbara

The motivation to be competent and correct in one’s beliefs has been investigated in empirical research looking at the psychological biases that occur when individuals attempt to explain why their beliefs are correct, despite the presence of evidence that contradicts that. In two studies, I examine one form of these phenomena, motivated disbelief, in the novel domain of immigration policy. After reading a passage on the types of harm that undocumented immigrants experience in U.S., politically conservative participants who read about a proposed immigration policy that was incongruent with their ideology minimized the extent to which they perceived injured undocumented workers as neglected relative to conservative participants who read about a more ideologically-congruent policy (study 1). Similarly, conservative participants who showed low support for a given policy minimized the extent to which they perceived neglect toward undocumented workers and the extent to which undocumented workers experience wage theft (study 2). These studies provide first steps toward unpacking the phenomenon of motivated disbelief within a complex societal issue with multiple groups of people involved (i.e., liberals, conservatives, immigrants). Future work will investigate ways to disrupt these biases in order to better understand the process of their occurrence.