SDCA Asia-Pacific Multidisciplinary Research Journal

Abstract

Motivated reasoning is generally used when people are faced by some threat to their self or beliefs. If this trigger is not present, then people will reason in a way that will help them reach accurate conclusions rather than preferred conclusions. The aim of this study was to understand motivated reasoning through performance on the Wason Selection task. The proposed hypothesis was that people will perform better in the Wason selection task when they are presented with threatening content about their early death, than when they are presented with non-threatening content about early death of an outgroup. The methodology included using a between subjects experimental design with two levels to which the participants were assigned based on their availability. The first level consisted of presenting the participants with a hypothesis that was threatening to them, and the second level consisted of presenting a hypothesis that was non-threatening to them. The convenience sample of 176 participants (M=88, F=88), were in the age group of 18-25 years. The study was conducted online using the zoom app. The data was analyzed (z=3.157 at α=0.05, p=0.00079, one tailed) and the results indicated that the performance on the Wason selection task was significantly better in the threatening condition as opposed to the non-threatening condition.

Keywords: Motivated reasoning. Wason selection task. Confirmation bias. Disconfirmation.