Evaluating Kunda’s (1990) Motivated Reasoning Theory - Ted Hennicke Progress Review

Why are people more likely to believe the things they wish to be true? Such a strange and important phenomenon deserves explanation. In 1990, social psychologist Ziva Kunda published her seminal work on this topic: a theory of motivated reasoning. Briefly, she postulates that there are two different types of reasoning, with different underlying mechanisms and characterised by specific motives. To Kunda, the reason we are able to believe what we want, is that our emotional conflicts of interest bias us towards arriving at (and rationalising) self-serving conclusions. In order to explain how exactly such a bias arises, she introduces a “biased accessing and construction model” of motivated reasoning, which is itself informed by findings regarding the well-known hypothesis-confirmation bias. With this model, she argues that our expectations and our desires bias our reasoning in a similar manner, and probably via the same cognitive mechanisms. The aim of my own work here is to critically evaluate both her original theory, as well as her proposed mechanism for it. To this end I am using argument reconstruction, mapping and analysis methods, with an emphasis on replicability. I am currently part-way through this work, and will share preliminary results in this presentation.