Rethinking the link between cognitive sophistication and politically motivated reasoning.
Open accessAbstract
Partisan disagreement over policy-relevant facts is a salient feature of contemporary American politics. Perhaps surprisingly, such disagreements are often the greatest among opposing partisans who are the most cognitively sophisticated. A prominent hypothesis for this phenomenon is that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning-commonly defined as reasoning driven by the motivation to reach conclusions congenial to one's political group identity. Numerous experimental studies report evidence in favor of this hypothesis. However, in the designs of such studies, political group identity is often confounded with prior factual beliefs about the issue in question; and, crucially, reasoning can be affected by such beliefs in the absence of any political group motivation. This renders much existing evidence for the hypothesis ambiguous. To shed new light on this issue, we conducted three studies in which we statistically controlled for people's prior factual beliefs-attempting to isolate a direct effect of political group identity-when estimating the association between their cognitive sophistication, political group identity, and reasoning in the paradigmatic study design used in the literature. We observed a robust direct effect of political group identity on reasoning but found no evidence that cognitive sophistication magnified this effect. In contrast, we found fairly consistent evidence that cognitive sophistication magnified a direct effect of prior factual beliefs on reasoning. Our results suggest that there is currently a lack of clear empirical evidence that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning as commonly understood and emphasize the conceptual and empirical challenges that confront tests of this hypothesis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
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Observational approaches do not allow researchers to separate the impact of obtaining factual knowledge from the effect of other variables that are typically correlated with both domain-specific political knowledge and attitude polarization.
“These observational approaches raise a critical inferential challenge, as they do not allow researchers to separate the impact of obtaining factual knowledge from the effect of other variables that are typically correlated with both domain-specific political knowledge and attitude polarization, such as the intensity of one’s political group identity11, one’s pre-existing factual beliefs21, or one’”
From Factual knowledge can reduce attitude polarization (2025) · cites this paper as [21]
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GRAHAM, M. H. (2026) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.1017/s0003055426101452 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Identifying and Debunking Environmentally-Related False News Stories – An Experimental Investigation
Grüner, S. (2021) · German Journal of Agricultural Economics · doi:10.30430/gjae.2021.0176 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
Epistemic Dependence, Cognitive Irrationality, and Epistemic Conflicts of Interests
Müller, B. (2022) · Logos & Episteme · doi:10.5840/logos-episteme202213324 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Blanchar, J. C., & Norris, C. J. (2024) · Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review · doi:10.37016/mr-2020-157 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
What Should We Believe About Belief?
Levy, N. L. (2021) · Oxford University Press eBooks · doi:10.1093/oso/9780192895325.003.0001 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Sude, D. J., Sharon, G., & Dvir-Gvirsman, S. (2023) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1242865 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Where is the Motivation in Motivated Numeracy?
Glüer, K., & Spectre, L. (2024) · Review of Philosophy and Psychology · doi:10.1007/s13164-024-00737-w · Cited by 3 · see citing works
Identifying and debunking environmentally-related false news stories—An experimental studyPreprint
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- Authors
- Tappin, B. M., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G.
- Venue
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- Published
- 2021-06
- Volume
- 150
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1095-1114
- ISSN
- 0096-3445 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-2222
- OpenAlex
- W3094739336
- Cited by
- 154
- References
- 23
- Citations by year
- 2026: 12 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 28 · 2020: 27 · 2019: 5
- FWCI
- 32.16
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Journal of Experimental Psychology General (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-sa)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Economic and Social Research Council
- Miami Foundation
- William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
- John Templeton Foundation
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
- Cogito Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Keywords
- cognitive sophistication, partisan disagreement, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias
- MeSH terms
- Cognition, Humans, Motivation, Politics, Problem Solving, United States
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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