I Reason Who I am? Identity Salience Manipulation to Reduce Motivated Reasoning in News Consumption

Past research has drawn on motivated reasoning theories in order to explain why some people fall for fake news while others do not. One such motivated reasoning paradigm proposes an elicitation of identity threat when incoming information is inconsistent with prior attitudes and beliefs. This experienced identity threat leads to biased information processing in order to defend those prior attitudes and beliefs. Building on this, we conducted two studies to test the overarching hypothesis that shifting identity salience changes information processing outcomes. In two experimental studies with N = 353, we tried to (1) increase factual information acceptance and (2) decrease misinformation acceptance. Our data support the previously found results that identity-threatening information decreases the evaluation of information compared to a control group. Findings also suggested that identity-supporting information was evaluated better, respectively. However, in both studies, identity salience manipulation did not change the evaluation of the information. Still, we found that those participants for whom another identity was made more salient indicated reduced feelings of anger compared to participants who were threatened and received no identity salience manipulation. We interpret these results as a promising first step to counter motivated reasoning processes.