英文标题：
《Do People Engage in Motivated Reasoning to Think the World Is a Good
  Place for Others?》
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作者：
Michael Thaler
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最新提交年份：
2020
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分类信息：

一级分类：Economics        经济学
二级分类：General Economics        一般经济学
分类描述：General methodological, applied, and empirical contributions to economics.
对经济学的一般方法、应用和经验贡献。
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一级分类：Quantitative Finance        数量金融学
二级分类：Economics        经济学
分类描述：q-fin.EC is an alias for econ.GN. Economics, including micro and macro economics, international economics, theory of the firm, labor economics, and other economic topics outside finance
q-fin.ec是econ.gn的别名。经济学，包括微观和宏观经济学、国际经济学、企业理论、劳动经济学和其他金融以外的经济专题
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英文摘要：
  Motivated reasoning is a bias in inference in which people distort their updating process in the direction of more attractive beliefs. Prior work has shown how motivated reasoning leads people to form overly \"positive\" beliefs that also serve to bolster one\'s self-image in domains such as intelligence, prosociality, and politics. In this paper, I study whether positivity-motivated reasoning persists in domains where self-image does not play a role. In particular, I analyze whether individuals motivatedly reason to think that the world is a better place for others. Building off of the design from Thaler (2020), I conduct a large online experiment to test for positivity-motivated reasoning on issues such as cancer survival rates, others\' happiness, and infant mortality. I find no systematic evidence for positivity-motivated or negativity-motivated reasoning, and can rule out modest effects. Positivity is not a sufficient condition for motivated reasoning.
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