Running Head: Motivated Reasoning and Self-Belief Motivated Reasoning and Self-Belief2

In 2010, a team of political scientists published a study with a curious result. They invited roughly 200 residents of Eastern Iowa to take part in a hypothetical presidential primary election for either the Democratic or Republican Party. Participants read about various candidates, gathered information about each one, and then selected their tentative favorite. The research team then introduced an important wrinkle. For some participants, their favorite candidate continued to express ideologically consistent opinions, presumably opinions the participant liked. For others, the candidates expressed opinions that opposed the participants’ stance about 25 % of the time. For another group, the candidate almost completely reversed— taking positions that disagreed with the participant about 75 % of the time (Redlawsk, Civettini, & Emmerson, 2010). At the end of the study, participants were asked to offer a final decision about which candidate they preferred. Not surprisingly, participants whose candidates stayed uniformly true to participants ' own views showed little change from their initial preferences. Also unsurprising, participants confronting candidates who ended up mostly disagreeing with them tended to significantly lower their initially positive impression of the candidate. But what abou