Influences of Evidence, Beliefs, and Emotion

Abstract

Within the reasoning literature, most investigations of motivated reasoning, belief-biased reasoning and the effects of emotional material have all been conducted separately from each other. Motivated reasoning theories state that reasoning can be goal-directed, and all future processing is allocated towards achieving an end goal or justifying a position. Dual process theories of reasoning, on the other hand, allow for analytic thinking to discriminate between strong and weak arguments. Additionally, theories of emotion in reasoning state that emotional content can negatively impact future processing. Our goal was to investigate the interaction of argument strength, prior belief and emotional content in argument evaluation over the course of three experiments (N = 360). Participants completed questionnaires that involved reading conversation transcripts and ranking the strength of the evidence presented in the conversation. Conversations were varied on their argument strength, believability, and emotional content. Following the conversations, we asked participants to personally rank the believability and emotionality of the topics used within the experiment. We found that most participants were sensitive to the strength of the evidence presented in the conversations, but a small minority were more likely to appraise the evidence based previous beliefs. The impact of emotional versus neutral content was found to minimally impact the appraisal of presented evidence. These data suggest an explanation based on both motivated reasoning theories and dual process theories of reasoning. Most individuals were able to discriminate between strong and weak evidence, as predicted by dual process theories. However, some individuals were more sensitive to the believability of the presented statements and exhibited examples of belief bias phenomena. As motivated reasoning theories would predict, their appraisal of evidence may have been guided towards an end-goal that was congruent with their previous beliefs. Individual differences played a large role in our current findings, and future directions should investigate the driving forces behind these differences.