bnjmacdonald
commented
7 years ago See Lewandowsky et al. (2012) for a review of research on correcting misinformation that mentions the importance of mental models, dissonance, et cetera.
Here is also a selection of other papers on motivated reasoning and asymmetric belief updating that may be useful:
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2821919
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2010.00772.x/full
- http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/sjdm/journal.sjdm.org/13/13313/jdm13313.pdf
- https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mic.3.2.114
- http://rkellygarrett.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Garrett-and-Weeks-Promise-and-peril-of-real-time-corrections.pdf.
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X0600218X
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0272-4332.2004.00543.x/full
- http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/50/19406.short
- See other work by Brendan Nyhan and Thomas Leeper for citations in the domain of politics.
On belief formation, more generally:
Description
User story: As a psychologist, I want to know about what cognitive processes might lead each treatment appeal to be effective or ineffective.
In the paper (0b2154eba39ede78e599430f1d7801b8dae1bdab), we make some remarks about how the embrace unnatural appeal may be particularly effective because it leverages individuals' "mental models" and "cultural intuitions". This appeal may also induce cognitive dissonance that is easiest to resolve by becoming more accepting of clean meat, whereas the debunk unnatural appeal induces cognitive dissonance that is easiest to resolve by coming up with some other argument why clean meat is bad.
However, these remarks are fairly shallow and ad hoc, and we do not do a very good job in the most recent version of the paper (0b2154eba39ede78e599430f1d7801b8dae1bdab) as setting up (or citing) what existing theories would lead us to expect one pro-clean meat appeal to be more effective than another. Also, our discussion of results does not relate the findings to more general phenomena of interest to behavioral economists and psychologists, such as motivated reasoning, asymmetric updating from new information, and cognitive dissonance.
So we should put more effort into setting up clear expectations about why each pro-clean meat appeal might be effective or ineffective, drawing on recent work in social psychology, behavioral economics, and political science on belief updating, congitive dissonance, mental models, et cetera. This will increase the reach of our readership beyond those who are just interested in clean meat and closely related topics (e.g. GMOs, vaccines).