Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research on motivated reasoning is currently bogged down by two concomitant debates. The first concerns whether motivated reasoning is the product of fast and intuitive or slow and deliberative thinking processes. The second concerns how prevalent it is given that much of the evidence is compatible with normative counter-explanations, most notably Bayesian reasoning. This paper seeks to advance both debates. Across two experiments, we detect evidence for politically motivated reasoning in a way that cannot be explained by Bayesian rationality. We also find that motivated reasoning is attenuated by cognitive sophistication: Those participants who scored low on a classic version of the Cognitive Reflection Test exhibited motivated reasoning on a politicized version of it, but those participants who scored high did not. Our results suggest that motivated reasoning is a real empirical phenomenon, primarily driven by fast and intuitive thinking.