We are all prone to motivated reasoning in which our personal goals distort our beliefs. For example, most drivers and most professors think they are above average. Ziva Kunda’s 1990 paper “The Case ...

National Review reports that the Justice Department announced that it found my university, George Mason, in violation of Title VI: At the center of the scandal is Gregory Washington, the university's ...

A large body of work shows that reasoning motivated by partisan cues and prior attitudes leads to unreflective decisions and disparities in empirical beliefs across groups. Surprisingly little ...

It’s hard to believe hand-washing was once considered controversial. In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that when medical students performed autopsies in the morning and delivered babies in the ...

In this article, we demonstrate that individuals use motivated reasoning to convince themselves that their self-serving behavior is justified, which in turn affects the distribution of resources in ...

“Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings” (The Chronicle Review, October 25) is a classic case of misdirection. As Paul Bloom well knows, the phenomenon of motivated ...

Motivated reasoning is the idea that our mental processes often cause us to filter the evidence we accept based on whether it’s consistent with what we want to believe. During these past few weeks, it ...

Others have mentioned the difference between changing core beliefs related to identity versus other beliefs. I wonder if cultivating an identity around making choices based on data/facts/reason helps ...