Justification Requirements as a Debiasing Measure Against Motivated Interpretations of Factual Information?

Factual information takes center stage in the democratic machineries of most Western societies today where it is often assumed that information can be used to rationalize decision-making. However, the potential of factual... [ view full abstract ]

Factual information takes center stage in the democratic machineries of most Western societies today where it is often assumed that information can be used to rationalize decision-making. However, the potential of factual information to inform decision-making has been questioned by literature on motivated biases in peoples’ processing of information with political implications. This article uses a survey experiment and a decision board experiment to investigate whether citizens and politicians alter their reasoning about politicized information when they know that they will be asked to justify their evaluations of the information. It is hypothesized that both groups are biased by information-related political attitudes in the outset, but that asking them to justify their evaluations will lead to more effortful and less biased evaluations. Results reaffirm prior literature’s findings of biased reasoning among citizens as well as among politicians but the results are mixed with regard to the effects of justification requirements. Both citizens and politicians spend more effort on processing information when they expect to be asked to justify their evaluations, but while results are suggestive of this leading to less influence of attitudes among citizens, the reversed is the case among politicians. Thus, the same intervention seems to have debiasing effects on citizens but bias-strengthening effects on politicians.