Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two studies investigated how political attitudes affect causal learning. Participants were tasked with testing economicpolicies to maximize the economic output of an imaginary country. Based on their political attitudes, participants wereeither strongly in favor or strongly against the policies (Study 1), or could also have neutral attitudes (Study 2). Somepolicies had fairly clear positive or negative effects. But some were more ambiguous; they initially had positive effects buteventually had negative effects on the economy, or vice versa. After testing the policies, participants falsely believed thatthe policies that fit with their political attitudes were more effective, and this bias was exacerbated for the policies that haddifferent short vs. long-term effects. This research shows the power of motivated reasoning and provides a well-controlledmethod to study the effects of motivated reasoning on causal learning in explore-exploit situations.