Looking for bias in all the right places: Incentive-driven optimism and pessimism

What motivates people to choose biased evidence over more accurate sources? Psychological models of motivated information search have typically explained this by appealing to specific directional motives such as the desire to preserve self-esteem (Beauregard & Dunning, 1998) or signal ingroup membership (Flynn et al., 2017). Although this proliferation of directional accounts helps highlight specific incentives (e.g., self-enhancement, social pressure) that may motivate individuals to prefer biased information, what’s missing is a more general understanding of how any large possible incentive might lead people to prefer biased information in the first place. My thesis offers a parsimonious model of how the mere possibility of any large reward or loss might lead people to prefer biased information through three general processes– a “rational” account in which people prefer biased information based on the increased reward or mitigated losses that can be gained from acting on that information; a trust-based account in which people prefer biased information because trusting it leads to better consequences, and a congeniality bias account in which people prefer biased information because it justifies their belief in how they should act. In chapter 2, I formalize each of these processes and highlight how each predicts that the possibility of large incentives should moderate preference for biased information, such that the possibility of large rewards for making correct decisions would increase preference for optimistic information, while the possibility of large losses for making incorrect decisions would increase preference for pessimistic information. In chapter 3, I provide empirical demonstration of this moderation in three studies. Finally, in chapter 4, I show in a final study how all three of these processes can significantly account for individual differences in biased information search. Together, this work demonstrates that the mere presence of large incentives can lead to preference for biased information through three general motivational processes. Thus, even in lieu of more specific directional accounts of an individual’s motivations, biased information search can be understood through knowledge of the consequences an individual stands to face by acting on that information.

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