Political ideology, emotion response, and confirmation bias

Abstract

Motivated reasoning can serve to help resolve emotional discomfort, which suggests emotion as a likely moderator of such reasoning. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by examining emotion and confirmation bias in the political domain. Results from two preregistered studies, which involved over 900 unique participants, document a confirmation bias across distinct dimensions of belief and preference formation. Also, ideologically dissonant information significantly worsens self-reported emotion. With some exceptions, the evidence generally supports the hypothesis that negative emotion moderates the strength of the bias, which highlights the importance of emotion response in understanding and potentially counteracting confirmation bias.