Motivated Reasoning

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects, in order than by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusion may remain inviolate.

Francis Bacon

Monday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contains two articles about drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus shale by the method known as fracking. One of them reports that the U. S. Chamber of Commerce is beginning a new lobbying effort in order to persuade the citizens of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia not to annoy the natural gas industry by enacting new taxes or environmental regulations. The Chamber will spend “millions of dollars” on this campaign. (The actual amount is not stated.) Gene Barr, president of Pennsylvania's Chamber of Business and Industry, said, “You can call it advocacy or lobbying, but I use the word education.” Presumably, the campaign will be at least as educational as those slick Range Resources commercials that tell us how much a few of our fellow citizens have profited from natural gas royalties.

It would seem that this campaign is a waste of money here in Pittsburgh, since the state of Pennsylvania is already a wholly-owned subsidiary of the natural gas industry, and has given it the most industry-friendly legislation in the country. I guess if you're drilling for natural gas, you can never be too careful.

Elsewhere in the same newspaper, under “National Briefs,” I found an op-ed masquerading as a news article that might easily have been part of the Chamber of Commerce's new campaign. Under the headline, “Experts dispute fracking critics,” it carefully selects paragraphs from the beginning and near the end of this Associated Press article. The original article is already very pro-industry, using selective citation of research to brand several claims made by opponents of fracking as false. The edited version removes what little balance the original contained by removing the last two paragraphs, which report false statements by the natural gas industry.

What caught my eye was a reference to social psychology in order to justify the claim that fracking opponents have fallen victim to self-delusion. Political scientist Mark Lubell attributes the problem an “an actual psychological process” called motivated reasoning, in which people “insist on believing things that aren't true, in part because of feedback from other people who share their views.” 

As a psychological term, “motivated reasoning” is frustratingly vague. It tells us almost nothing about process. But it is true that, since Leon Festinger published A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in 1957, social psychologists have conducted thousands of studies showing that people are more likely to accept information that supports their prior beliefs than information that contradicts them. Clearly this is something that we all do a lot of the time. Here's journalist Chris Mooney explaining motivated reasoning and explaining one of the processes involved.

Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler did four studies designed to test whether media reports can be expected to correct false beliefs. Participants read two mock news articles—a false claim, followed by an article which corrected it. For example, one study presented President George W. Bush's false claim from after the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had possessed weapons of mass destruction, followed by an article about the Duelfer Report that refuted that claim. All four studies found evidence of motivated reasoning, in that the corrections did not significantly reduce the original misperceptions in their overall sample.

More importantly, two of the studies found evidence of a “backfire effect,” in which the correction increased belief in the original false claim, among certain subgroups. Subjects were asked to classify themselves on a 7-point scale of liberalism-conservatism. In the WMD study described above, the liberals and centrists either corrected their false beliefs or were unchanged, but the conservatives became more extreme in their belief that WMDs had been found. However, this backfire effect failed to occur when the study was repeated.

The backfire effect was replicated, however, in a second study in which participants were first told that tax cuts would stimulate the economy and increase government revenue, and then told that research had shown this claim to be false. Again, it was the conservatives who increased their belief in the efficacy of tax cuts after being shown studies that found them to be ineffective. The fourth study was conducted in order to try to find a backfire effect among liberals. Subjects were falsely told that President Bush had completely banned stem cell research, and later correctly told that he had only banned federally-funding research, but allowed privately-funded research to continue. In this case, participants once again persevered in their original beliefs, but no backfire effect was found.

Here's Brendan Nyhan discussing this research and making some suggestions as to how journalists can correct their audience's false beliefs.

The Nyhan-Reifler studies seem to suggest that conservatives are more likely to engage in motivated reasoning than liberals. In fact, after reviewing the entire literature on this subject, Chris Mooney comes to this conclusion. However, we need to be extremely skeptical before accepting this hypothesis. It's certainly possible that liberals would show a backfire effect if the study involved an issue that was more central to their political ideology.

Here's the problem with the fracking article. It's far too easy to read the motivated reasoning literature selectively and use the concept as a weapon to attack your political opponents, thereby engaging in motivated reasoning about motivated reasoning. The claim of motivated reasoning should only be used when the argument someone is defending has been clearly refuted by the evidence. The AP article fails to distinguish between claims that are false and those that are merely unsubstantiated. A claim can be unsubstantiated if it has not been conclusively tested, or if the available evidence is mixed.

While it is certainly true that some opponents of fracking have made false or irresponsible accusations, the claims that fracking will contaminate the air or ground water, or that it will expose people to cancer-causing chemicals, are plausible and serious enough to justify independent—that is, not industry-funded—research at multiple locations. The argument that natural gas is a cleaner burning fuel than coal has been questioned by highly competent research. This debate is further complicated by the fact that it may take decades for conclusive evidence of some harms caused by fracking to emerge.

Meanwhile, we should not be surprised if our corporate media, which are heavily dependent on advertising by the fossil fuel companies, treat industry propanganda as if it were unbiased and accuse those who question it of motivated reasoning.