Benjamin Converse on Judgment, Motivated Reasoning, and Democratic Uncertainty

Much of Benjamin Converse’s work sits at the intersection of psychology, judgment, and institutional decision-making. In this conversation, he reflects on the gap between the rational-actor model and the way real people actually process information, and on why that gap matters for anyone trying to think seriously about policy, organizations, and public life.
What emerges is a view of human behavior that is neither conventionally economic nor cynically psychological. Converse is less interested in declaring people perfectly rational or hopelessly irrational than in finding a more useful middle ground: one that accounts for incentives, situations, identity, attention, and the ways people come to believe what they expect, want, or are primed to believe.
The discussion also turns outward, from individual judgment to democratic life. Converse explains why more information does not necessarily produce more rational politics, why motivated reasoning often deepens division rather than resolving it, and why, despite all the messiness of modern democracy, he remains cautiously optimistic that curiosity, humility, and negotiation can still produce progress.
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—Benjamin Converse is a social psychologist at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, where he studies judgment, belief formation, social interaction, and decision-making in public and organizational life

Beyond the Rational Actor Model
Ben Wolf: When you first studied how people form beliefs, what was the biggest misconception about how people actually process information?

Benjamin Converse: It took me a while to get here. This isn’t where I started. But now I’ve been teaching for basically seventeen years, teaching MPP students, and I think the biggest misconception I continue to work on with students goes back to the rational actor model.
What I’m trying to do is help them find a sweet spot for real humans in everyday life. In our case, at a policy school, that means real humans in everyday life who need to think about policy, economics, organizations, leaders, decision-makers, however you want to put it. What is a useful mental model for how this works?
I think it’s really unproductive to get into any kind of psychology-versus-economics debate. That can be fun intellectually, but it’s not all that useful for people who want to go do their work. So I try to help students see what economic models can help them do when they’re reasoning about causality and big systems, and what a psychological or behavioral science approach can help them do when they’re reasoning about essentially the same problems, but maybe at a smaller scale, in one-on-one interactions or small groups.
So in terms of misconceptions, some people adopt what Thaler and Sunstein call the “Econ” misconception, the idea that people are perfectly rational actors, like supercomputers who know everything. But then on the other end of that spectrum is a misunderstanding of psychology that casts everybody as dumb and irrational. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and there’s a lot of nuance to understanding how we make decisions in the real world.


An Unlikely Path Into Social Psychology
BW: You mentioned this wasn't where you started. What was your original field of study, and what led you to social psychology today?

BC: Sure. One of the funniest things about my journey, in hindsight, is that I took social psychology early on in my undergraduate career. Even though that is now my primary professional identity, I would say, I’m a social psychologist when asked what I do in most settings, it really didn’t make a huge impact on me at first.
It was a very standard introductory undergraduate class, and in hindsight I think what happened to me is what happens to a lot of students who take social psychology for the first time: as soon as you hear these ideas, they seem very obvious, if you don’t take enough time to pause and consider the opposite. I took that class, it was fine, and I moved on with my life. I didn’t expect to be a psychology major at that point, and I certainly didn’t expect to devote the rest of my professional career to those ideas.
What got me hooked was signing up on a whim for a class on experimental design. It was a small class that all the psychology majors had to take, but I signed up for it out of interest. It walked through the process of formulating a research question, crafting hypotheses based on prior literature, thinking about how to operationalize variables, and then testing them. I found that process fascinating, just encountering for the first time all of these clever ways behavioral scientists were trying to learn about behavior and the patterns going on in interactions, and the invisible things happening inside people’s heads. That’s where I got really excited about psychology.
From there, it was the luck of life. I got a little curious about a certain topic, and then I got passed from guardian angel to guardian angel, people who were doing really cool things and who happened to be amazing mentors. My undergraduate advisor invited me to do an honors thesis, so I got to work through that full process I had been so excited about.
Her name is Kimberly Quinn. She was a postdoctoral scholar when I worked with her in college at Dartmouth, and just as I was graduating she took her first faculty job. As part of her startup package she was able to hire a lab manager, so she invited me to come help set up her lab. That was at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
When I showed up, she asked, “What do you want to do while you’re here?” I had no idea. She said a lot of her colleagues there were developmental psychologists studying theory of mind, how we form ideas about what’s going on inside somebody else’s head even though we can’t see their thoughts or feel their emotions. She handed me some social psychology on the topic, including a paper by Nick Epley and his collaborators, and I started getting really excited about that work.
When it came time to think about graduate school, I reached out to Nick Epley to see if he might be taking graduate students. I thought he was still in a psychology department, but it turned out he had just moved and was getting set up in the business school at the University of Chicago. He was part of that early wave of social psychologists building labs in business schools and teaching management courses.
There was an opportunity to work with him, and I hesitated because I thought, I don’t want to go to business school. I don’t know anything about business. I want to be a social psychologist. He basically said, don’t worry. Come here. If you still want a job in a psychology department later, you’ll be able to get one. I’m pretty confident that by the time you’re done here, you won’t want to.
He was a very compelling person, and I trusted him. So I went to Chicago, worked with him at the Center for Decision Research, and there were just amazing people there doing incredible things.
Then, five or six years later, there was a job advertised at the University of Virginia at a policy school. That never would have caught my eye if I hadn’t already had the experience of being a social psychologist in a professional school. It was the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, and at the time they were building with affiliated faculty. Tim Wilson, an eminent social psychologist whom I had idolized, was leading the search. I thought, I have no idea what it would mean to work at a policy school, but if Tim Wilson is involved, I might be interested.
I think the experience I had gained in Chicago looked valuable to the people assembling the Batten faculty, and I ended up here. I’ve been here going on seventeen years now. It’s introduced me to questions I never would have asked before and people I never would have collaborated with before. It’s been amazing.


From Basic Research to Public Policy
BW: What would you say is the ultimate goal or intended use case for your research? Is it a prediction model, a tool for policymaker reflection, or something else?

BC: That’s a great question. It’s hard to answer because across my portfolio of work I probably have different answers.
I’m incredibly lucky to be a researcher at a place that allows all of us to roam pretty freely. Some of the projects I start are very basic social psychology. We’re trying to understand often undocumented or unrecognized systematic patterns in how people think, interact, or pursue their goals. That kind of work is often early-stage discovery work, documenting that this is a thing people do systematically. I hope that kind of work will be interesting, important, broad, and robust enough that in ten or fifteen years it becomes the kind of thing policymakers or decision-makers ought to know about. But research takes a long time, and that work needs to be replicated and extended, and we need to understand when it applies and when it doesn’t before, in my view, we go handing it off to decision-makers.
Then I have other work that’s much more applied in nature, where we think we have a pretty good idea of the psychology and how it works, but we don’t yet know how it applies to a particular problem. I’ve been able to do some work on decision-making related to climate change, often with respect to climate technology, and that work is much further along in the research process. In those cases, yes, I do hope decision-makers will be able to learn from the findings and incorporate them into how they have conversations or make choices.
So it’s really the full spectrum. I’m intellectually satisfied by being able to move between those kinds of projects, with different collaborators, over time. I’m lucky to be in a place that supports that kind of breadth.


Political Belief, Identity, and the Power of Situation
BW: One of the enduring questions in public life is whether people reason their way into political beliefs or inherit them first and rationalize them later. In your view, what shapes political judgment most, and how do identity, evidence, and prior commitment factor into that decision?

BC: I’d answer that as a card-carrying social psychologist. What that means to me is the power of the situation. I think situations are incredibly powerful in shaping people’s behavior.
I would never argue against the existence or importance of personality or stable beliefs. Both are real, both are relevant. But my own mind, because of my training and experience, is naturally biased toward thinking about the situations people are in. And like many social psychologists, I use “situation” in a very broad sense. I mean essentially anything outside the person.
That includes what we inherit from our closest caregivers, who shape us enormously. It includes the communities we grow up in and the early experiences we have. It includes the incentives we perceive in the world, ranging from financial incentives to social incentives. It includes the information ecosystems people live in, and their propensity to consume information, and their curiosity, or lack of curiosity, to go beyond those ecosystems in a sincere effort to learn.
In my psychology for leadership course for MPP students, I introduce what we might call nested models: individuals inside social interactions, inside groups, inside communities, inside broader institutional constraints, culture, and time. I think for all interesting behavioral problems, there are relevant factors at all of those levels of analysis.
Most people can’t work across all those levels all the time. There are just too many. So one piece of practical advice we try to give students is to identify the level they naturally care about most. Some people are drawn to individuals; others are drawn to institutions, culture, or history. But whatever level you’re naturally drawn to, it’s a good idea to understand the problem at that level, and also one level down and one level up. One step more concrete, and one step more abstract.
So to your original question about where political and sociocultural beliefs come from, I think it’s a super complicated and super rich set of problems. But it’s always worth asking yourself: what’s going on one level down, and what’s going on one level up?


Motivated Reasoning in the Information Age
BW: A lot of people assume that more information should make politics more rational. Instead, modern research shows that the information environment often seems to make people more certain and polarized. What is the explanation for this phenomena?

BC: The idea that explains the most variance for me is motivated reasoning.
What you expect to believe, what you want to believe, and maybe also what you’re primed to believe, even if you don’t fully recognize it as something you want or are seeking, all of those things serve as information filters. They affect how you perceive the information coming in.
Again, going back to my MPP class, because I think of it as the greatest-hits version of social psychology for people interested in public policy, we spend a couple of weeks on the mechanisms of motivated reasoning. There are lots of ways we end up believing what we expect to believe and what we hope to believe.
It starts with attention. Take a short news story. You could read it and attend to certain parts of it, and I could read the same story and attend to different parts. We might walk away with qualitatively different conclusions, or with the same conclusion but for different reasons, or with different levels of confidence. Why did we pay attention to different parts? That’s a complicated question, but it has to do with what we expect to find, what we hope to find, and what degree of skepticism we’re likely to bring to the information.
Then there’s memory, and there are the standards we apply to information once we encounter it. If somebody hands you a policy brief, and you start reading it with the background question “must I believe this?” that is very different from reading it with the question “can I believe this?” You are likely to consume the same argument and the same data in different ways.
So there’s a whole set of mechanisms that lead us to interpret information differently. Those mechanisms help explain how people can encounter more information and walk away more confident in what they believed in the first place.


Democracy, Complexity, and Cautious Optimism
BW: As we begin to close, I want to take a step back from the research itself. After studying judgment and belief revision for years, has it made you more optimistic or more cautious about how democracies handle uncertainty?


BC: I don’t know that it has made me more optimistic or more cautious. I am naturally curious whenever I encounter a behavioral question or behavioral problem.
Some people make progress in understanding the world by simplifying things. Other people make progress by adding complexity. Neither is necessarily better. I happen to be drawn to complexity and to thinking about nuance. And the answer, ultimately, is that a single human’s judgment is extremely complicated. A democracy is therefore infinitely more complicated.
I tend to assume, and I’m motivated in my work and teaching by the idea, that whatever people are doing, they are doing it for some set of reasons that make sense to them. If you approach any kind of decision-maker with that in mind, and you are curious and careful, I think you can make at least some progress in understanding what matters to them, why it came to matter, and how they are understanding the world.
So even though democracy seems extremely messy right now, and even though democracy in some sense always seems extremely messy, I still hold the belief that people are doing what they’re doing for reasons that make sense to them and their situations. If we approach those interactions with curiosity, with humility, and with care about how confident we are in the conclusions we jump to, I think we can understand why things are happening the way they are.
And from there, the optimism I do have comes from experience learning about and teaching negotiation. Successful negotiators do not have to agree on everything to make progress. They figure out how to make trades and find mutually satisfactory ways to solve problems. So if you approach these issues as a social psychologist, with curiosity and calibrated confidence, and then approach solutions with a negotiator’s mindset, then yes, from that point of view, I do remain somewhat optimistic.


A Reading Recommendation
BW: Finally, if there were a student interested in learning more about your work and the kinds of problems you confront on a day-to-day basis, what reading would you recommend, and why?
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BC: I would go with an oldie but a goodie: Thomas Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So.
The examples are dated now, which often happens with books like that. I think the book is probably around thirty-five years old, at least in the edition I know best. But the questions in it are the questions that got me interested in this work.
It uses a judgment-and-decision-making lens to ask how reasonable, intelligent people can come to believe things that are, in some cases, completely false, demonstrably untrue. Not because they are stupid or foolish or selfish or ignorant, but because they are operating with a whole suite of psychological strategies, shortcuts, and tricks that work most of the time. They are highly functional and highly useful for navigating a complicated world, but they can also lead us astray in predictable and systematic ways.
So from a process standpoint, the book helps students understand what I think of as the behavioral scientist’s approach to the world: how can we set up processes that might prove us wrong about how human behavior works? And from a content standpoint, it helps us think carefully about many of the questions that animate your project, based on what you told me at the beginning, why you’re persistent about reaching out to a wide variety of people working on important problems, trying to understand their perspective, and trying to understand how, at a societal level, we continue to interact with people who have very different priorities and motivations, but still find a way to be productive and prosperous.