[Seminaire CREM] Présentation de Ann-Kristin Reitmann, CREM - Faculté Des Sciences Economiques

Abstract:
Subjective beliefs play a crucial role in decision-making and are key to understanding behavior in a variety of areas. Contrary to the assumption that a fully rational agent forms beliefs by taking all available information into account, evidence shows that humans are selective in their information selection and processing and exhibit various biases, such as "motivated beliefs." In this study, we conduct five online experiments to examine the impact of motivated beliefs on the selection and processing of information regarding an adverse health behavior: smoking. Our study is set in Indonesia, which has the highest rates of male tobacco smoking in the world. It also has the largest Muslim population, and various religious authorities advocate against smoking through religious rulings. Thus, we examine whether information selection is motivated by religious affiliation and prior beliefs about smoking and related habits. Our results provide evidence of motivated beliefs and confirmation bias in information selection. We find that religious affiliation strongly predicts article headline selection and that subjects' choice of article reflects their prior beliefs and habits regarding smoking. After randomly assigning articles, we observed patterns consistent with confirmation bias in information processing: subjects assigned to the preferred article rated the article more favorably in terms of liking, usefulness, and reliability and paid more attention to its content. The different experimental designs allow us to explore the underlying mechanisms and potential alternative explanations.
co-écrit avec Teguh Dartanto, Renate Hartwig, Jan Priebe