Good News Is Not a Sufficient Condition for Motivated Reasoning

Michael Thaler

No 10915, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: People often receive good news that makes them feel better about the world around them, or bad news that makes them feel worse about it. This paper studies how the valence of news affects belief updating, absent functional and ego-relevant factors. Using experiments with over 1,500 participants and 5,600 observations, I test whether people engage in motivated reasoning to overly trust good news versus bad news on valence-relevant issues like cancer survival rates, others’ happiness, and infant mortality. The estimate for motivated reasoning towards good news is a precisely-estimated null. Modest effects, of one-third the size of motivated reasoning in politics and performance, can be ruled out. Complementary survey evidence shows that most people expect good news to increase happiness, but to not systematically lead to motivated reasoning. These results suggest that belief-based utility is not sufficient in leading people to distort belief updating in order to favor those beliefs.

Keywords: motivated reasoning; belief-based utility; experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D83 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-upt
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Working Paper: Good News Is Not a Sufficient Condition for Motivated Reasoning (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10915

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