Motivated Reasoning in Politics: Considerate Arguments, Persuasive Rhetoric, and the Affect Effect

Abstract

When facing difficult choices–candidates to elect, ballots to support, ideas to defend, decisions to endorse–individuals engage in mental processes to justify them. Decades of research on motivated reasoning, memory retrieval, cognitive paths and emotional predispositions clearly show that: 1) differences in individual profiles (political knowledge, cognitive needs, motivation, etc.) shape the decisions made; 2) such effects are strongly mediated by the content of information available as well as the knowledge stored. Political arguments on issues at stake that are exchanged in the public space are manipulated by individuals according to A) their social and ideological profile and political preferences; B) the dramatically expanding available information online and memorized knowledge. Ordinary citizens face new arguments and they must decide with little delay on how to process them. Political elites ought to imagine communicative strategies that are based on persuasive arguments, and then implement such plans during political campaigns. Both may feel deeply frustrated by the resulting oversimplification of their arguments. This panel deals with political reasoning in a broad sense: individuals are stimulated by the nature and content of political information; elites are compelled to a race to the top in elaborating communicative strategies. Its aim is to provide answers to such questions as (a) the causal relations between the ways individuals play with counterintuitive arguments or dissonant information and synchronize them with their level of political sophistication; (b) the argumentative quality of political persuasion and its impact on actual opinion formation. The panel welcomes theoretical papers modelling the interactions between political reasoning, political judgment, and political knowledge as well as evidence-based papers dealing with reasoning within a limited set of political information or political knowledge. Contributions may be based either on survey data, or on experimental approaches. They may address single-case, paired comparisons, or larger N comparative studies.

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