Logical Fallacy of Motivated Reasoning

The Logical Fallacy of Motivated Reasoning occurs when those things that disagree with our preconceived notions are more carefully scrutinized and rejected, a kind of emotion-driven and selective skepticism. It is an extreme form of confirmation bias, where the worldview, or fake reality, is the filter that determines what reality is. Motivated reasoning confirms what is already believed, while ignoring contrary data. Motivated reasoning drives people to develop elaborate rationalizations to justify holding beliefs that logic and evidence have shown to be wrong or at least unsupported. Motivated reasoning responds defensively to contrary evidence, actively discrediting such evidence or its source without justification from logic or evidence.

Examples of the Logical Fallacy of Motivated Reasoning

Emotion-driven defense of the Big-Bang-Billions-of-Years-No-Flood-Molecules-to-Man story despite the fact that it violates several known laws of science and all the evidence is against it.