•  18
    Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs (2006)
    with Charles S. Taber
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 24 (2): 157-184. 2006.
    We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically acce…Read more
  •  8
    The Scope and Generality of Automatic Affective Biases in Political Thinking: Reply to the Symposium
    with Charles S. Taber
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 24 (2): 247-268. 2012.
    Our response to this symposium on our 2006 paper centers on three questions. First, what motivations exist in the political wild, and do our experimental manipulations realistically capture them? We agree that strong accuracy motivations are likely (but not certain) to reduce biases, but we are not at all confident that the real world supplies stronger accuracy motivations than our subjects received. Second, how can we square our findings of stubbornly persistent beliefs and attitudes with the w…Read more
  •  20
    The scope and generality of automatic affective biases in political thinking: Reply to the symposium
    with Charles S. Taber
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 24 (2): 247-268. 2012.
    Our response to this symposium on our 2006 paper centers on three questions. First, what motivations exist in the political wild, and do our experimental manipulations realistically capture them? We agree that strong accuracy motivations are likely (but not certain) to reduce biases, but we are not at all confident that the real world supplies stronger accuracy motivations than our subjects received. Second, how can we square our findings of stubbornly persistent beliefs and attitudes with the w…Read more
  •  29
    Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs (2006)
    with Charles S. Taber
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 24 (2): 157-184. 2012.
    We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically acce…Read more