Morally Offensive Scientific Findings Activate Cognitive Chicanery

We document a mutually reinforcing set of belief-system defenses—"cognitive chicanery”—that transform“morally wrong” scientific claims into “empirically wrong” claims. Fiveexperiments(4 preregistered, N=7,040)show that when participants read identical abstracts that variedonly in the sociomoral desirability of the conclusions, morally offended participants were likelier to (1) dismiss thewriting asincomprehensible (motivated confusion); (2) deny the empirical status of the research question (motivated postmodernism), (3) endorse claims inspired by Schopenhauer’s Stratagems for always being rightand the CIA’s strategies for citizen-saboteurs, and (4) endorsea set of contradictory complaints, including that sample sizes are too small andthatanecdotes are more informativethan data, that the researchers are both unintelligent and crafty manipulators, andthat the findings are bothpreposterous and old news. These patterns are consistent with motivated cognition, in whichindividuals seize on easy strategies for neutralizing disturbing knowledge claims, minimizing the need to update beliefs.All strategies were activated at once, ina sort of “belief-system overkill,” that ensures avoidance of unfortunate epistemic discoveries. Future research should expand on this set of strategiesand explore how their deployment may undermine the pursuit of knowledge.