Related papers: Good News Is Not a Sufficient Condition for Motiva…
Motivated reasoning posits that people distort how they process information in the direction of beliefs they find attractive. This paper creates a novel experimental design to identify motivated reasoning from Bayesian updating when people…
When people choose what messages to send to others, they often consider how others will interpret the messages. A sender may expect a receiver to engage in motivated reasoning, leading the receiver to trust good news more than bad news,…
Is more information always better? Or are there some situations in which more information can make us worse off? Good (1967) argues that expected utility maximizers should always accept more information if the information is cost-free and…
The human mind is capable of extraordinary achievements, yet it often appears to work against itself. It actively defends its cherished beliefs even in the face of contradictory evidence, conveniently interprets information to conform to…
Understanding why people trust or distrust one another, institutions, or information is a complex task that has led scholars from various fields of study to employ diverse epistemological and methodological approaches. Despite the…
I study a model of costly Bayesian persuasion by a privately and partially informed sender who conducts a public experiment. The cost of running an experiment is the expected reduction of a weighted log-likelihood ratio function of the…
Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health, to sports, business, and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence-believing…
We study how social image concerns shape information sharing among peers. Individuals receive a signal about a binary state of the world characterized by both a direction and a veracity status. While the direction is freely observable,…
When people receive new information, sometimes they revise their beliefs too much, and sometimes too little. In this paper, we show that a key driver of whether people overinfer or underinfer is the strength of the information. Based on a…
The proliferation of information disseminated by public/social media has made decision-making highly challenging due to the wide availability of noisy, uncertain, or unverified information. Although the issue of uncertainty in information…
While it is often assumed that searching for information to evaluate misinformation will help identify false claims, recent work suggests that search behaviours can instead reinforce belief in misleading news, particularly when users…
We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to…
Men and women systematically differ in their beliefs about their performance relative to others; in particular, men tend to be more overconfident. This paper provides support for one explanation for gender differences in overconfidence,…
Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be…
Different theories posit different sources for feelings of well-being and happiness. Appraisal theory grounds our emotional responses in our goals and desires and their fulfillment, or lack of fulfillment. Self Determination theory posits…
Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excellent, if not the best available account of inductive reasoning. This is so because there are general and definite rules for the change of subjective probabilities through…
Readers take decisions about going through the complete news based on many factors. The emotional impact of the news title on reader is one of the most important factors. Cognitive ergonomics tries to strike the balance between work,…
Users rely on search engines for information in critical contexts, such as public health emergencies. Understanding how users evaluate the trustworthiness of search results is therefore essential. Research has identified rank and the…
Motivated reasoning - the idea that individuals processing information may be motivated to either arrive at accurate beliefs or arrive at desired conclusions - has been well-explored as a human phenomenon. However, it remains unclear…
Common sense suggests that when individuals explain why they believe something, we can arrive at more accurate conclusions than when they simply state what they believe. Yet, there is no known mechanism that provides incentives to elicit…