The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments

Taber, Charles S.; Cann, Damon M.; Kucsova, Simona

doi:10.1007/s11109-008-9075-8

Cited by 374 publications

(293 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Previous studies have identified motivating factors that generate more competent behavior and higher levels of knowledge (Luskin 1990;Eveland 2004). However, following the literature on motivated reasoning (Kunda 1990;Taber et al 2009), we argue that political attitudes motivate individuals to process information in a very different way, resulting instead in less competent behavior. People hold a variety of politically-related attitudes, some of them strong and stable, others are weak and variable.…”

Section: Responsibility Judgments Motivated By Political Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 92%

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Allocating Responsibility in Multilevel Government Systems: Voter and Expert Attributions in the European Union

Wilson

Hobolt

2015

The Journal of Politics

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Democratic accountability requires that citizens can assign responsibility for policy outcomes, yet multilevel structures of government complicate this task as they blur lines of accountability and leave voters uncertain about which level of government is responsible. This study examines the extent to which Europeans are able to navigate the complex and ever-changing divisions of responsibility between their national governments and the European Union (EU). Specifically, we compare citizen and expert responsibility attributions to evaluate if and how voters can competently assign policy responsibility to the European Union. Using multilevel modeling to analyze survey and media data from 27 EU member states, we demonstrate that extreme attitudes decrease citizen competence by motivating biased information processing. Yet at the contextual level, highly politicized environments result in more correct allocations of responsibility by creating an information-rich context. Keywords: multilevel governance, attribution, responsibility, polarization, knowledge, European Union 1 Lack of political knowledge among citizens is well-documented (see e.g. Converse 1964; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Indeed, the level of citizen ignorance about politics have led some scholars to suggest that "the low level of political knowledge and the absence of ideological reasoning have lent credence to the charge that popular control of the government is illusory" (Iyengar 1987, 816). Citizens living in systems of multi-level governance, such as the European Union (EU), face a greater challenge when it comes to holding their representatives to account, since they have the additional task of differentiating between multiple levels of government when deciding whom to credit and blame for policy outcomes (Arceneaux 2006;Cutler 2004 Cutler , 2008 de Vries et al. 2011;Johns 2011). Yet, if popular control is to be more than an illusion, then it is crucial that citizens have at least a basic understanding of the different levels of government responsibility and are able to assess their government's performance. The very notion of elections as a means of holding governments to account assumes that citizens are able assign responsibility for policy outcomes (Key 1966; Fiorina 1981;Rudolph 2003). Since attribution of responsibility is not a matter of preferences or policy positions, citizens cannot easily rely on proxies or shortcuts to help them distinguish governmental responsibility (Lupia 1994;Sniderman 2000). This raises the question of whether citizens are able to correctly differentiate responsibility between levels of national and supranational government. More fundamentally, it begs the question of what factors enable citizens to acquire the information necessary to do so. This article examines individuals' ability to attribute policy responsibility to the European Union. To be able to assess the degree of competence in citizens' responsibility judgments, we compare citizen evaluations to expert judgments. The theoretical fra...

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Section: Responsibility Judgments Motivated By Political Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Citizens with strong prior attitudes are often biased information processors, motivated by (dis)confirmation biases (Taber and Lodge 2006;Taber et al 2009). …”

Section: Responsibility Judgments Motivated By Political Attitudesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Allocating Responsibility in Multilevel Government Systems: Voter and Expert Attributions in the European Union

Wilson

Hobolt

2015

The Journal of Politics

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“…Attitude strength is the degree to which the attitude resists change, is stable, influences information and decision making processes, and predicts behavior (Krosnick & Petty, 1995). The relative strength or weakness of attitudes influences framing effects (Nelson, Clawson, & Oxley, 1997), survey response (Zaller, 1992), and polarization (Taber, Cann, & Kucsova, 2009;Wagner, 2007). To use the topic of this note as an example, strength of feelings regarding the job performance of President Barack Obama likely explains whether or not people remain silent or actively defend/attack him, whether they are ambivalent to his policy initiatives or eagerly embrace/reject them, whether attitudes toward Obama do or do not affect attitudes toward people perceived to be close to him (e.g., Joe Biden), and whether Obama-related political matters motivate people to vote and otherwise get involved in the political arena.…”

Section: Attitude Strengthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Survey Self-Reports: Using Physiology to Tap Political Orientations

Wagner

Deppe

Jacobs

et al. 2014

Int J Public Opin Res

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“…As a result, equally intelligent citizens may use the information that they have received through communication to support their own value predispositions, thus expanding ideological belief gaps (51,67,68). When individuals are motivated to discount messages that contradict their prior beliefs, they will invest effort into mentally denigrating and counterarguing this incongruent information, thereby reaffirming their current position, regardless of the message (69). In addition, values can bias assessments of the degree of scientific support for human causes of climate change; people overestimate the degree of certainty about and support for positions that are congruent with their value predispositions (50).…”

Section: Imcib In Context: Global Climate Changementioning

confidence: 99%

An integrated model of communication influence on beliefs

Eveland

Cooper

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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How do people develop and maintain their beliefs about science? Decades of social science research exist to help us answer this question. The Integrated Model of Communication Influence on Beliefs presented here combines multiple theories that have considered aspects of this process into a comprehensive model to explain how individuals arrive at their scientific beliefs. In this article, we (i) summarize what is known about how science is presented in various news and entertainment media forms; (ii) describe how individuals differ in their choices to be exposed to various forms and sources of communication; (iii) discuss the implications of how individuals mentally process information on the effects of communication; (iv) consider how communication effects can be altered depending on background characteristics and motivations of individuals; and (v) emphasize that the process of belief formation is not unidirectional but rather, feeds back on itself over time. We conclude by applying the Integrated Model of Communication Influence on Beliefs to the complex issue of beliefs about climate change.knowledge | learning D ecades of scholarship in communication and related fields have examined the role of mass and interpersonal communication as means by which members of the public acquire information or beliefs about a variety of important topics (1, 2). However, there are several properties of this literature that make it less than ideal for succinctly answering the larger question of how scientific beliefs are formed. First, there is a tendency to focus research on a particular form of communication in isolation from others (e.g., news rather than entertainment or media rather than interpersonal discussion), with an emphasis on media effects. Second, most empirical models offer snapshots of associations among variables (3, 4) rather than consideration of how feedback processes connect communication and beliefs in both causal directions. Third, the models tested often seem to have been developed on the basis of the data available in a particular study rather than on a broader consideration of the theoretical processes involved. In those cases in which the models do seem more comprehensive, they usually eschew formal prediction in favor of offering more abstract frameworks and encouraging data exploration (5). Overall, although there is a wealth of insight and evidence relating communication and beliefs, it tends to be scattered because of emphasis on particular subprocesses rather than emphasis on the whole.Sociologist Robert Merton [ref. 6, pp. 52-53 (emphasis in original)] argued that "theories of the middle range hold the largest promise, provided that the search for them is coupled with a pervasive concern with consolidating special theories into more general sets of concepts and mutually consistent propositions" (6). The current body of research on media selection and impact on beliefs, which has, to date, been relatively circumscribed by focusing attention on subprocesses, would seem to be ripe for a comprehens...

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The Motivated Processing of Political Arguments

Cited by 374 publications

References 17 publications

Allocating Responsibility in Multilevel Government Systems: Voter and Expert Attributions in the European Union

Allocating Responsibility in Multilevel Government Systems: Voter and Expert Attributions in the European Union

Beyond Survey Self-Reports: Using Physiology to Tap Political Orientations

An integrated model of communication influence on beliefs

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