“My thinking has changed but beliefs have not”: Motivated reasoning in learning to teach abortion

ABSTRACT

In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, social studies education has remained startlingly silent on the topic of abortion. In this design-based research study, we present a qualitative analysis of how preservice secondary social studies teachers made sense of evidence and how they learned about abortion in a mixed-reality teaching simulation built around pedagogies of practice on facilitating controversial issue discussions. Drawing on political psychology and motivated reasoning, we analyzed participants’ engagement with amicus briefs in Dobbs v. Jackson and their thinking about evidence and the issue itself. We found participants generally made sense of the documents in ways consistent with principles of motivated reasoning and the primacy of emotions in evidence evaluation. We analyze shifts in participants’ thinking and conceptual understanding about abortion as a result of their participation, including distinctions and connections drawn between thinking, believing, and learning. Our analysis suggests that even those with intransigent opinions can learn about abortion, that evidence and evidence evaluation are more complicated and nuanced than the literature often suggests, and that emotion plays an integral role in evaluation and argumentation. We conclude by arguing that abortion cannot remain in the proverbial shadows in social studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Abortion
• controversial issues
• emotion
• evidence evaluation
• motivated reasoning
• Supreme Court

Acknowledgments

The authors extend their sincere and considerable gratitude to James Barton, Lauren Colley, Matt Deroo, Stephanie Jones, Katie Kelly-Hankin, and Amelia Wheeler for the thoughtful guidance and insight each of them provided in the development of this project. Thank you to Jim Garrett for your thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts. Thank you to Nate Geller for your help formatting Figure 2.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.