Confessions of a Motivated Reasoner

How bias shapes politics, science, and everyday life.

Aug 24, 2025

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When President Biden launched his re-election bid in 2024, most Americans doubted he was mentally sharp enough for another term. Yet inside his circle and much of the Democratic party, the story was different: as Biden’s doctor declared him “fit for duty” without a cognitive test, friendly commentators waved off concerns as partisan noise. It wasn’t just public spin; many seemed to believe it. Ezra Klein reports that his conversations with people in Biden’s orbit suggest they weren’t so much lying to the American public as they were lying to themselves, or at least misreading the evidence.

That’s the strange power of motivated reasoning—when we need something to be true, we can convince ourselves that it is.

It’s easy to point the finger at politicians and pundits, but I fall into motivated reasoning all the time. For years, I told myself Trump was a flash in the pan — one outrageous headline away from irrelevance. Because I wanted him to go away, I seized on every gaff or scandal as proof the fever was about to break, while ignoring sturdier evidence of his enduring appeal among many voters.

My philosophical views can’t escape desire either. At least since college, I’ve known about the horrid conditions of animals on factory farms, which churn out the vast majority of modern meat and dairy. For years I pushed it aside. The moral status of animals is complicated, I thought. And I can’t make a dent in such an entrenched industry; it’s not my responsibility. Yet those excuses rang hollow. The conditions on industrial farms amount to animal cruelty, which is clearly immoral, and I think it’s important to do my part recycling and avoiding clothes from sweat shops. Looking back, it’s clear my reasoning was shaped by the desire to keep eating delicious, readily-available animal products without alienating my family or sticking out like a sore thumb at dinner parties. (Turns out this is true for many others, as well.)

Of course, I could have simply said, “I like steak and pork chops, so I’ll keep eating them.” But that wouldn’t have passed muster, especially among fellow ethicists. Like most humans, I strive to make choices for good reasons that my peers won’t laugh off, so I concocted them. Curious creatures, we are.

Without realizing it at the time, I cut my teeth in philosophy with motivated reasoning.

Around 2010, many psychologists and philosophers were touting studies that seemed to demonstrate the powerful role of emotions in ethics. In one experiment, half of participants were randomly assigned to evaluate moral scenarios while a foul smell wafted through the area (thanks to the discreet deployment of a commercial fart spray). These people, who were feeling more disgusted than the control group, reportedly made significantly harsher moral judgments. The headline: People inhaling an odious smell will think even morally neutral actions are atrocities!

As I dug into the research, the flaws weren’t hard to spot. Yet many theorists looked past them because the studies were flashy and fit a surprising story that upended the standard view in moral psychology. A later meta-analysis revealed that the published results didn’t replicate well in the unpublished literature and were likely artifacts of the field’s bias in favor of provocative studies.

This coincided with the replication crisis in psychology and other sciences, a turning point for me and many other researchers. I became obsessed with the question: Why can’t we reproduce many findings in psychology, neuroscience, oncology, and numerous other fields?! (My coping strategy is to treat the world’s problems as research projects.)

Some problems in science do stem from outright fraud, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it lie subtler forms of corner-cutting and motivated ignorance. Researchers can run studies with small sample sizes, selectively report results, skip statistical corrections, dream up hypotheses after collecting data, and engage in other ”questionable research practices,” as the literature now calls them. Some researchers deliberately relax standards to get ahead, but many more sincerely believe their choices are justified, at least in the moment. Unlike fraudsters, they’re fooling themselves.

It became clear that scientists, too, fall into wishful thinking, denial, selective attention to evidence, and other forms of motivated reasoning. The motivation isn’t usually money but status: publishing clean, exciting results can help advance one’s career, support a pet theory, and give one’s graduate students a fighting chance in academia’s brutal job market.

All these human foibles are troubling, especially for science and politics, but we shouldn’t be too cynical or pessimistic.

First, although “motivated reasoning” has negative connotations, it can be harnessed for good. When examining the disgust research with a fine-toothed comb, I wasn’t only chasing the truth (though I’d like to think that was part of it). I also wanted to prove my philosophical chops by exposing flawed reasoning, especially in research that bolstered my intellectual opponents. As a card-carrying moral rationalist, I was eager to undercut those sentimentalists who believe with David Hume that we’re all mere slaves of our passions. In this way, values and preferences can make us more skeptical, less complacent with the status quo.

Second, the worst forms of motivated reasoning can even be counterbalanced, to some extent, by the thirst for knowledge. Scientists and journalists can all be pulled toward the unvarnished truth while tugged by their own agendas. Some climate skeptics, as well as catastrophizers, have reversed course, despite knowing they’ll lose friends and followers. Even staunch politicians can come to see the moral light. As Governor of Alabama in the 1960s, George Wallace built his career on segregation but later renounced those views and sought forgiveness for championing racist policies. That change of view cost him dearly in friendships and political aspirations, but he could no longer deny the moral truth staring him in the face.

Third, sometimes competing interests are relatively small, if never completely absent. When I first looked into research on the neurobiology of addiction, I had no horse in the race. My inclination was to believe that addiction is a brain disease, because that’s what most neuroscientists and healthcare providers now believe based on decades of research. After looking further, I was surprised to find myself unable to believe any of the core tenants of the view. Now, maybe I’m wrong. But what I’m not is motivated by a desire to defend a pet theory. (Well, at least back then I wasn’t. Now I have a horse in the race and its name is Addiction Ain’t No Brain Disease.)

Finally, it is possible to curb motivated reasoning in the moment. While I often catch my own wishful thinking and willful ignorance after the fact, others do better. In his memoir Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey writes about repeatedly turning down a lucrative offer to star in yet another romantic comedy. The bid started at $5 million, but when it got up to $14.5 million he decided to take another look:

And you know what? It was a better script. It was funnier, more dramatic, just an overall higher quality script than the first one I read with the $5 million offer. It was the same script, with the exact same words in it, but it was far superior to the previous ones.

Despite going through these mental gymnastics, McConaughey politely declined.

So here we are. Motivated reasoning is everywhere, not just in politics. Even when everyone is biased, however, not all is lost. A marketplace of motivated reasoning can lead to intellectual progress, if we own up to our biases and nourish the desire for truth.

If I’m honest, I probably notice it everywhere in part because it has become central to my own research, to my professional and personal identity. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and boy do I enjoy thwapping motivated reasoners over the head (even self-flagellation is satisfying). I better be vigilant.

And that’s the purpose of this Substack. As I post about moral controversies and social change, I’ll be looking for motivated reasoning in myself and others, but without being cynical or alarmist. Taking a long, hard look at human nature can be illuminating and empowering (again, the coping). We can learn to recognize motivated reasoning, and not just its worst forms, but also the ways it leads us to dig more deeply, to leave no stone unturned.