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AbstractAttempts to correct political misperceptions often fail. The dominant theoretical explanation for this failure comes from psychological research on motivated reasoning. We identify a novel source of motivated reasoning in response to corrective information: the justification of socially undesirable preferences. Further, we demonstrate that this motivation can, under certain conditions, overpower the motivation to maintain congruence. Our empirical test is a national survey experiment that asks participants to reconcile partisan motivations and the motivation to justify voting against a racial minority candidate. Consistent with our argument, racially prejudiced participants dismiss corrections when misinformation is essential to justify voting against a black candidate of their own party, but accept corrections about an otherwise identical candidate of the opposing party. These results provide new insight into the persistence of certain forms of political misinformation.

In spite of what appears to be the increasingly negative tone of media coverage, this Element suggests that the prevalence of positive news is likely to increase, for three reasons: (1) valence-based asymmetries vary over time, (2) valence-based asymmetries vary across individuals, and (3) technology facilitates diverse news platforms catering to diverse preferences. Each of these claims is examined in detail here, based on analyses of prior and/or novel data on media content, psychophysiological responses, and survey-based experiments. Results are considered as they relate to our understanding of media gatekeeping, political communication, and political psychology, and also as actionable findings for producers of media content, communications platforms, and media consumers.

Research in psychology has established that people have visceral positive and negative reactions to all kinds of stimuli—so-called implicit attitudes. Implicit attitudes are empirically distinct from explicit attitudes, and they appear to have separate consequences for political behavior. However, little is known about whether they change in response to different factors than explicit attitudes. Identifying distinct antecedents for implicit and explicit attitudes would have far-reaching implications for the study of political persuasion. We hypothesized that implicit attitudes would change primarily in response to political advertisements' emotional valence, but this turned out to be wrong. In contrast, our next hypothesis that implicit (but not explicit) attitudes would improve in response to increased familiarity with an attitude object was supported across several tests. Aside from this finding, our studies illustrate how routine preregistration helps researchers convey what they learned from each test—including when predictions are not borne out.