Motivated reasoning, selective exposure, misinformation, judgment & decision making, cognitive biases, scientific and economic reasoning, personality & individual differences, religious cognition, evolutionary psychology, public choice, electoral systems, quantitative methods, agent-based models and computer simulations, pedagogy

Dissertation

Individual Differences in Selective Exposure to Attitude-Congruent Political Information: Intuition, Faith, and Social Environment
When seeking political information, people are motivated to selectively seek information that will support their prior beliefs or attitudes rather than information that will challenge them. However, there may be differences in the degree to which individuals engage in such selective exposure. I seek to identify dispositional or environmental variables that may influence the development of such individual differences. I use controlled information-search tasks on a controversial political issue to measure the relative frequency with which subjects choose to read arguments that are congruent with their prior attitudes on that issue. In the first chapter, I show that the preference for reading attitude-congruent information is stronger among individuals who rely more on automatic or intuitive thought processes rather than effortful reflection, as measured by the Cognitive Reflection Test. In the second chapter, I investigate the effects of religious faith. Some religions explicitly teach the importance of maintaining one’s beliefs, and I theorize that habits of selective exposure to information congruent with one’s religious beliefs could, as a side effect, lead to habits of selective exposure in other contexts such as political information seeking. I find that, in an information-search task on a non-religious political issue, the preference for reading attitude-congruent arguments is correlated with scores on a self-report scale of rigid religious conviction and can be increased by priming people to think of religion. The third chapter investigates the effects of having a politically homogeneous or heterogeneous social environment. To enable stronger causal inference, I study residents of student housing, a situation in which many residents live with people they have not chosen on the basis of political similarity. I do not find clear and consistent evidence that the preference for reading attitude-congruent information is stronger or weaker among residents who live with a politically similar roommate, though I do find such an effect among a sub-group: Republican-leaning residents. I also do not find strong evidence that priming people to think of the members of their social networks as more politically similar or dissimilar to their selves affects the tendency to read congruent information.

Full text: Cragun dissertation.pdf

Publications

More details: http://jamescragun.com/research/rigid_religious_faith_promotes_selective_exposure.html

Other current projects

Evolution of One-Shot Cooperation Under Uncertainty: A Revised Agent-Based Model
Cooperation for mutual benefit is a fundamental aspect of politics, and behavioral economics research has provided much knowledge about the degree to which humans tend to cooperate and the conditions under which they do so. Although it is often not optimal, from a traditional economic (rational egoist) perspective, to cooperate when in a one-shot (non-repeated) interaction, experimental research has shown that many individuals do cooperate even in one-shot interactions. This may be because the typical experimental situation in which subjects are told with certainty that they are in a one-shot interaction is unlike the situations humans often encounter in real life. In real interactions, an individual would have a belief about whether the current interaction is a one-shot or repeated interaction, but those beliefs could sometimes be wrong. The opportunity cost of failing to cooperate when an interaction turns out to be a repeated interaction may be greater than the cost of cooperating when an interaction turns out to be a one-shot interaction, so a tendency to cooperate even when the individual believes the interaction is more likely to be a one-shot interaction could be beneficial in the long run. I use a computer simulation to show the evolution of this behavioral trait. Over thousands of generations of simulated agents interacting with each other, producing offspring in proportion to their level of success in those interactions, and passing their behavioral tendencies to their offspring, the tendency to cooperate even when they believe a one-shot interaction is more likely becomes common in the population. This model is based on a model previously published by Delton et al (2011) but includes some important modifications. More details, and an interactive web-based interface for the simulation, can be found here:
http://jamescragun.com/research/evolution_of_cooperation.html

The importance of interactive control variables when testing interactive hypotheses
In political science, we often want to know how the effect of X on Y depends on the value of M, a moderating variable. This is sometimes measured using a regression model of Y that includes a multiplicative interaction between M and X. In many studies, the primary hypothesis of interest is that M affects the effect of X on Y. In such situations the outcome of interest is not just the value of Y but the effect of X on Y. Sometimes researchers include extra ``control" variables in the model because they are concerned that one of these other variables may be a confounding variable. However, many researchers do not think carefully enough about how a potential confound might occur when testing an interactive hypothesis. They fail to realize that adding a control variable C, without also adding a multiplicative interaction between C and X, will only control for simple additive effects of C on Y and will not control for any confounding effects C may have on the outcome of primary interest (the outcome of primary interest being the effect of X on Y). A more detailed explanation of the problem can be found here: http://jamescragun.com/teaching/interactive_control_variables.html. I am currently working on simulations to determine in what situations the failure to include an interactive control variable is most problematic, and I am conducting a review of the political science literature to determine how often political scientists attempt to control for potential confounding variables when testing an interactive hypothesis but fail to include interactive control variables.

Does anticipation of a coming vaccine affect willingness to comply with prevention measures now?
Does telling people that a COVID vaccine will soon be available make people more likely or less likely to engage in risky behaviors now? I conducted a study to answer this question. My results can be seen here: http://jamescragun.com/research/does_anticipation_of_vaccine_affect_prevention_compliance.html