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Fishing for Good News: Motivated Information Acquisition

Si Chen & Carl Heese

Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics2025https://doi.org/10.1086/735787article
ABDC A
Weight
0.61

What the paper says

The motivated reasoning literature argues that people skew their beliefs to feel moral when acting selfishly. We study the information acquisition of decision-makers with a motive to form positive moral self-views and one to act selfishly. The selfish motive makes individuals dynamically “fish for good news”: They are more likely to continue acquiring information having so far observed information indicating that acting selfishly is harmful to others, and more likely to stop after information indicating it is harmless. Further analysis finds no evidence the selfish motive worsens others’ outcomes and suggests this is due to individuals fishing for good news.

20 citations

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1086/735787

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@article{si2025,
  title        = {{Fishing for Good News: Motivated Information Acquisition}},
  author       = {Si Chen & Carl Heese},
  journal      = {Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1086/735787},
}

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Fishing for Good News: Motivated Information Acquisition

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Evidence weight

0.61

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.69 × 0.4 = 0.28
M · momentum0.72 × 0.15 = 0.11
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.