“There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification

Abstract

One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of “challenge interviews” on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and 9/11, we propose instead a social psychological explanation for the belief in this link. We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration's decision to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification: for these voters, the fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11.

Rumors and Health Care Reform: Experiments in Political Misinformation

“…20 Nyhan andReifler 2009, 2010. 21 See also Prasad et al (2009) Because partisans tend to evaluate new information with respect to their existing views, 26 encountering a rumor may have different effects for citizens of different political stripes. Still, while partisanship may color the processing of new information, it does not always control it, and even the strongest partisans can change their beliefs in response to new information.…”

Assessment of Maternal Attributions of Infant's Hostile Intent and Its Use in Child Maltreatment Prevention/Intervention Efforts

“…This phenomenon has been described as "motivated reasoning," which involves individuals seeking information that conforms to (or confirms) what they believe and discarding or ignoring inconsistent data, a phenomenon that has been reported in numerous studies. 13,14 Furthermore, the tendency to seek data or to make interpretations of data in a manner that confirms existing schemata, which is called "confirmation bias," 15 in some cases can result in an unwanted strengthening of original beliefs, which is referred to as "attitude polarization." 16,17 Outside of the child maltreatment literature, such outcomes have been reported following persuasive arguments and after nonpersuasive "factual" (educational) information has been presented.…”

Silence in official representations of history: Implications for national identity and intergroup relations

“…Previous research shows that people may engage in denial of facts relevant to a social issue in order to legitimize their current position regarding that social issue (Campbell & Kay, 2014;Prasad et al, 2009). Applied to our study, people may have relatively well-formed positions on policies regarding minority rights and freedom of expression (informed by endorsement of ethnocultural forms of national identification), which may guide their responses to historical events (e.g., motivate denial) that potentially have implications for present policies.…”