Partisan-motivated sampling: Re-examining politically motivated reasoning across the information processing stream

Area of Science:

• Social Psychology
• Political Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Increasing political polarization in the United States intensifies intergroup conflict and partisan biases.
• Previous research examined information search and interpretation biases separately.
• Partisan biases influence cognition and behavior, impacting how individuals process information about political groups.

Purpose of the Study:

• To integrate perspectives on information search and interpretation to understand partisan biases across the information processing stream.
• To investigate how biased information selection and skewed samples interact with motivated interpretations.
• To elucidate the mechanisms by which partisan biases produce evaluative biases.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments and four internal meta-analyses involving 2,431 participants.
• Participants freely sampled information about ingroup and outgroup political candidates until confident in their evaluation.
• Analysis of information sampling behavior, decision to stop sampling, and subsequent evaluations.

Main Results:

• Participants reliably sampled more information from their ingroup, associated with group-based motives.
• Ingroup information sampling led to greater variability in ingroup experiences, predicting evaluation timing and bias.
• Participants employed different sampling strategies when the ingroup performed worse, selectively integrating congenial experiences.

Conclusions:

• Biased information sampling interacts with motivated interpretation to create downstream evaluative biases.
• Understanding information processing biases is crucial for addressing intergroup bias.
• Findings extend classic psychological theories with implications for intergroup bias interventions.