Motivated responses to political communications: Framing, party cues, and science information

Among numerous foundational contributions, Milton Lodge’s work is notable for its artful adaptation of theories of psychological processing to political contexts. Lodge recognized the uniqueness of politics as a context for information processing, exploring situations which are defined, in part, by (1) low information and thus situations where information acquisition occurs, (2) contested informational claims, and (3) over-time dynamics. This is true of his work on schemas, online processing, and motivated reasoning. We focus on the last of these by studying applications of motivated thinking in three domains: competitive framing, partisan competition, and science opinion formation. We reveal how informative Lodge’s work in these areas has been and elaborate his findings to highlight the conditionality of political motivated reasoning in each domain.