Tracking politically motivated reasoning in the brain: the role of mentalizing, value-encoding, and error detection networks.

Abstract

Susceptibility to misinformation and belief polarization often reflects people's tendency to incorporate information in a biased way. Despite the presence of competing theoretical models, the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms of motivated reasoning remain elusive as previous empirical work did not properly track the belief formation process. To address this problem, we employed a design that identifies motivated reasoning as directional deviations from a Bayesian benchmark of unbiased belief updating. We asked the members of a proimmigration or an anti-immigration group regarding the extent to which they endorse factual messages on foreign criminality, a polarizing political topic. Both groups exhibited a desirability bias by overendorsing attitude-consistent messages and underendorsing attitude-discrepant messages and an identity bias by overendorsing messages from in-group members and underendorsing messages from out-group members. In both groups, neural responses to the messages predicted subsequent expression of desirability and identity biases, suggesting a common neural basis of motivated reasoning across ideologically opposing groups. Specifically, brain regions implicated in encoding value, error detection, and mentalizing tracked the degree of desirability bias. Less extensive activation in the mentalizing network tracked the degree of identity bias. These findings illustrate the distinct neurocognitive architecture of desirability and identity biases and inform existing cognitive models of politically motivated reasoning.