{"id":8354,"date":"2020-02-13T08:00:34","date_gmt":"2020-02-13T06:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/?p=8354"},"modified":"2020-02-24T11:01:44","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T09:01:44","slug":"when-the-truth-is-inconvenient-or-motivated-reading-of-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/when-the-truth-is-inconvenient-or-motivated-reading-of-information\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"When the Truth is Inconvenient or \u201cMotivated\u201d Reading of Information"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Femme

\u00a9 Jeanne Hagenbach<\/p><\/div>\n

In most economic and social contexts, agents base their decisions (to purchase, to invest, to accept a job offer, etc.) on\u00a0 available information. This information can take various forms: it can be verifiable or not, it can provide hard evidence of a fact or simply be a friend\u2019s advice or recommendation. But whatever form information takes, one assumption guides its use in most economic models: agents, who initially lack information, seek to obtain the most accurate depiction of the context in which they are evolving. In other words, agents\u2019 main objective is to discover the true \u201cstate of the world\u201d (a microeconomics concept that summarizes the uncertainty of the environment). For example, it is assumed that consumers wish to learn about the nutritional content of their food in order to adapt their diet, that workers want to better understand their work environment as well as the risks they may be taking in order to adapt their efforts, or that applicants like to evaluate precisely their chances of getting a job or a promotion in order to improve their application.<\/p>\n

Another goal than learning the truth<\/h5>\n

\"\"In a new research project,\u00a0 funded by the European Commission (ERC Starting Grant), Jeanne Hagenbach<\/a>, researcher at the CNRS and affiliated to the Department of Economics of Sciences Po, proposes to challenge this assumption: what if economic agents actually do not always want to know the truth about their environment? In other words, the idea is to consider that agents can form \u201cmotivated beliefs\u201d, that is, beliefs that serve a personal objective which is potentially more complex than the one of holding accurate beliefs. In this way, an agent may prefer not to know how slaughterhouses work and continue to consume meat, may want to go on smoking by willfully ignoring the health damage of this habit, or prefer wrongly believing that he\/she just got a good deal at the supermarket.<\/p>\n

The complex role of beliefs<\/h5>\n

Research in psychology has shown for long time that beliefs can affect an agent\u2019s well-being directly and not only because they allow him\/her to make better choices. For instance, the psychologist Melvin Lerner (1)<\/sup><\/a>Melvin Lerner, The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion<\/i><\/a>, Plenum Press, 1980<\/span><\/span>