Why Partisanship Is Such a Worthy Foe of Objective Truth

The truth is out there, but if it doesn’t come from “my side” who cares? In an era of “fake news” our relationship status with factual knowledge, and a shared reality, has changed to “it’s complicated”. Democracies depend on informed populations, but objective truth has of late taken a back seat to partisanship. In an essay published in Cell Press Reviews, New York University psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira attempt to demystify how partisan bias has skewed the pursuit of truth. “What we’ve done in our paper is pull together all the relevant research we can find in many different fields including political science, psychology, cognitive science and neuroeconomics and tried to develop a single, common framework that help us understand why people have accurate or inaccurate beliefs in some areas in politics,” says senior author Jay Van Bavel. While it’s clear that partisanship affects voters’ donation decisions ...