We are all prone to motivated reasoning in which our personal goals distort our beliefs. For example, most drivers and most professors think they are above average. Ziva Kunda’s 1990 paper “The Case ...

Have you ever wondered why some people refuse to change their minds, even when faced with hard facts? Well, it turns out that “motivated reasoning” is to blame — and we’re all guilty of it. It’s ...

Curiosity makes life interesting and helps to maintain interest in love relationships. Curiosity is as good for life and ...

A large body of work shows that reasoning motivated by partisan cues and prior attitudes leads to unreflective decisions and disparities in empirical beliefs across groups. Surprisingly little ...

One of the most striking aspects of the debate over the sexual assault accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is the extremely high correlation between what people think of the ...

National Review reports that the Justice Department announced that it found my university, George Mason, in violation of Title VI: At the center of the scandal is Gregory Washington, the university's ...

“Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings” (The Chronicle Review, October 25) is a classic case of misdirection. As Paul Bloom well knows, the phenomenon of motivated ...

It’s hard to believe hand-washing was once considered controversial. In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that when medical students performed autopsies in the morning and delivered babies in the ...

I am an atmospheric scientist, professor, and the former president of the American Meteorological Society. From these lenses, I have spent a career fascinated by weather, climate, and related societal ...

Motivated reasoning is the idea that our mental processes often cause us to filter the evidence we accept based on whether it’s consistent with what we want to believe. During these past few weeks, it ...