Misinformation and Motivated Reasoning: Responses to Economic News in a Politicized Environment

Abstract

Public opinion scholars have recently focused on understanding why surveys report such high levels of misinformation among otherwise knowledgeable and engaged partisans. In this paper, we take advantage of a natural experiment involving the October 2012 jobs report announcement to gain a more complete understanding of how individuals’ beliefs are influenced by new salient information in a politicized environment. We examine reactions by Republicans and Democrats on a factual question about the unemployment rate immediately before and after the announcement that unemployment had fallen below 8 percent for the first time during the Obama presidency. Using a variety of techniques, including response latency measures, we conclude that partisans did react to the jobs report by engaging in motivated reasoning, providing a clearer understanding of why individuals respond to factual questions in vastly different ways.