 Why People “Don’t Trust the Evidenceâ€Patrick W. Kraft, Milton Lodge and Charles S. Taber The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2015, vol. 658, issue 1, 121-133 Abstract: In this commentary, we embed the volume’s contributions on public beliefs about science in a broader theoretical discussion of motivated political reasoning. The studies presented in the preceding section of the volume consistently find evidence for hyperskepticism toward scientific evidence among ideologues, no matter the domain or context—and this skepticism seems to be stronger among conservatives than liberals. Here, we show that these patterns can be understood as part of a general tendency among individuals to defend their prior attitudes and actively challenge attitudinally incongruent arguments, a tendency that appears to be evident among liberals and conservatives alike. We integrate the empirical results reported in this volume into a broader theoretical discussion of the John Q. Public model of information processing and motivated reasoning, which posits that both affective and cognitive reactions to events are triggered unconsciously. We find that the work in this volume is largely consistent with our theories of affect-driven motivated reasoning and biased attitude formation. Keywords: scientific skepticism; political beliefs; motivated reasoning; affect; partisanship; ideology (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:658:y:2015:i:1:p:121-133 Access Statistics for this article More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science |
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