The psychology of political beliefs (or, why hard data isn’t always convincing)

The Washington Post:

When Donald Trump declared last weekend that he saw television footage of thousands of Muslims cheering from New Jersey on the day of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, fact-checkers moved quickly. The Post’s Glenn Kessler found no evidence of Trump’s claim, awarding it four Pinocchios. Others came to the conclusion.

And then something odd happened. Some rejected Kessler’s analysis, often pointing to this Post article from the week after the attacks which mentioned that “law enforcement authorities [in Jersey City] detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.” Celebrations of some people on rooftops is pretty far from thousands of people who were televised celebrating — and those rooftop celebrations were not confirmed as having actually happened. The article, in other words, in no way proves that Trump was telling the truth.

…

“We all think of ourselves as being these rational people. We hear evidence, and we process it,” said Peter Ditto, professor of social psychology at University of California at Irvine, when we spoke by phone this week. “What’s clear from decades of social psychological research is that people’s emotions get involved in their reasoning, their motivations, their intuitions. Those shape and bias the way we process information.”

Read the whole story: The Washington Post