Mindsets and Politically Motivated Reasoning about Fake News

Experimental data and codebook for a web study with N = 497 participants, investigating motivational states in relation to ideologically biased political reasoning.

False information published intentionally to mislead the public is common in today’s political communication. Given their professional appearance, many people struggle to detect fake news, especially online. Moreover, if the news is ideologically loaded, self-serving judgmental biases like the tendency to preferentially accept information that confirm one’s political standpoint aggravate the challenge of identifying false information. As a result of this ideological belief bias, people are less likely to detect fake news when it conforms with their political views. A current discussion in political reasoning research concerns the role of deliberation. Proponents of motivated reasoning accounts posit that deliberation may reinforce the ideological belief bias, because reasoning about politics primarily serves to defend and rationalize one’s position. An opposing view based on dual-process theory assumes that deliberation should reduce the ideological belief bias because deliberation facilitates an unbiased assessment. Building on mindset theory of action phases (MAP), this proposal investigates the role of motivational states in moderating the ideological belief bias. The MAP emphasizes the distinction between goal-setting and goal-striving to understand how cognitive processes are attuned to the different stages of goal pursuit. Accordingly, distinct cognitive procedures (mindsets) are activated during goal-setting and goal-striving to facilitate performance of these fundamentally different tasks. A deliberative mindset supports goal-setting by activating procedures that allow a balanced consideration of multiple goals’ pros/cons. The implemental mindset activates a distinct set of cognitive procedures that strengthen persistence in goal-striving and shield the goal from competing temptations. Given their unique characteristics, these mindsets may distinctly affect the detection of politically motivated fake news. The deliberative mindset stimulates more thorough information search and reasoning. If reasoning is primarily used to rationalize one’s political viewpoints, this mindset should amplify the ideological belief bias, and in effect, reduce fake news detectability. If intensified deliberation rather facilitates unbiased information processing, the opposite may be expected. The implemental mindset relies on self-serving biases to facilitate goal-striving and should thus accentuate the ideological belief bias. To test these hypotheses, an online-experiment is proposed in which some participants are induced with deliberative/implemental mindsets prior to rating the veracity of (true/fake) news headlines. Importantly, some headlines favor a politically conservative view; others lean toward a liberal perspective. This research contributes to the debate about deliberation in political reasoning, it sheds light on the motivational processes involved in identifying false information, and it informs the development of interventions to promote fake news detection.