The next speaker at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Luisa Gehle, whose interest is in the asymmetry of congruence in mis- and disinformation engagement. People tend to accept information which aligns with their worldviews, and reject incongruent claims more strongly; however, this has been shown mostly for the atrophied two-party system of the US, and might translate differently to multi-party systems as they exist in many European countries.
This study explored motivated reasoning processes by conducting a two-wave survey in Germany to examine attitudes towards migration and the Russian war on Ukraine, testing the impact of fact-checks, self-affirmation, mixed intervention, and control conditions on participants’ rankings of true and false statements.
Some key findings emerged. The more congruence between attitudes and statements, the more liberal the response bias – there was less scepticism. But in the Ukraine context, higher congruence led to worse discrimination, while in the migration domain, there was better discrimination (people were more likely to pick out false statements).
Attitude groups (who support or reject mainstream opinion, respectively) might play a role here too: counter-mainstream groups may access more alternative media, experience identity threats from the mainstream, and display stronger defensiveness. Here, for the migration domain, mainstream/counter-mainstream asymmetries mapped onto bias asymmetries. For the Ukraine domain, this did not work out in the same way, however: pro-Ukraine groups were most congruency-biased. This might point to the strong emotional responses who strongly support Ukraine, which were not matched by pro-Russia groups.
Testing for the effects of corrective intervention (fact-checks) and self-affirmation (personal reflection on key values) showed that corrective information improved sensitivity across the board, but did not vary by congruence or attitude; fact-checks did not reduce congruence bias. Self-affirmation in combination with fact-checks did moderate pro-Ukraine response biases, which would match the emotional interpretation of such biases.
Motivated reasoning is therefore a threshold rather than an accuracy phenomenon. Bias asymmetry is real, but context-dependent, and emotional investment may better predict its direction than ideological positioning alone.
