There’s a classic paper by Ziva Kunda, The Case for Motivated Reasoning, which I highly recommend. It’s one of the most influential works on how our desires can shape the way we think.
In this paper, Kunda proposes that reasoning can be driven by motivation, and then she divides reasoning into two major categories: those in which the motive is to arrive at an accurate conclusion, whatever it may be, and those in which the motive is to arrive at a particular, directional conclusion.
It seemed to me that this second category of reasoning could be classified as a bias. First, having a motive to reach a particular, directional conclusion leads to a deviation from... (read 636 more words →)
I agree that putting this into categories isn't as correct or useful as thinking about it on a spectrum. At the same time, we should keep in mind that there is no reason to believe that both categories of reasoning (endpoints of the spectrum) involve the same kinds of mechanism