Morally offensive scientific findings activate cognitive chicanery

Abstract

We document a mutually reinforcing set of belief-system defenses-cognitive chicanery-that transform "morally wrong" scientific claims into "empirically wrong" claims. Five experiments (four preregistered, N = 7040) show that when participants read identical abstracts that varied only in the sociomoral desirability of the conclusions, morally offended participants were likelier to (1) dismiss the writing as incomprehensible (motivated confusion); (2) deny the empirical status of the research question (motivated postmodernism); (3) endorse claims inspired by Schopenhauer's stratagems (The Art of Being Right) and the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) strategies for citizen-saboteurs; and (4) endorse a set of contradictory complaints, including that sample sizes are too small and that anecdotes are more informative than data, that the researchers are both unintelligent and crafty manipulators, and that the findings are both preposterous and old news. These patterns are consistent with motivated cognition, in which individuals seize on easy strategies for neutralizing disturbing knowledge claims, minimizing the need to update beliefs. All strategies were activated at once, in a sort of belief-system "overkill" that ensures avoidance of unfortunate epistemic discoveries. Future research should expand on this set of strategies and explore how their deployment may undermine the pursuit of knowledge.

Keywords: censorship; ideology; moral offense; motivated reasoning; science.