We are all prone to motivated reasoning in which our personal goals distort our beliefs. For example, most drivers and most professors think they are above average. Ziva Kunda’s 1990 paper “The Case ...

A large body of work shows that reasoning motivated by partisan cues and prior attitudes leads to unreflective decisions and disparities in empirical beliefs across groups. Surprisingly little ...

Have you ever wondered why some people refuse to change their minds, even when faced with hard facts? Well, it turns out that “motivated reasoning” is to blame — and we’re all guilty of it. It’s ...

One of the most striking aspects of the debate over the sexual assault accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is the extremely high correlation between what people think of the ...

National Review reports that the Justice Department announced that it found my university, George Mason, in violation of Title VI: At the center of the scandal is Gregory Washington, the university's ...

I am an atmospheric scientist, professor, and the former president of the American Meteorological Society. From these lenses, I have spent a career fascinated by weather, climate, and related societal ...

Something is rotten in the state of American political life. The U.S. (among other nations) is increasingly characterized by highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities ...

It’s hard to believe hand-washing was once considered controversial. In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that when medical students performed autopsies in the morning and delivered babies in the ...

Motivated reasoning is the idea that our mental processes often cause us to filter the evidence we accept based on whether it’s consistent with what we want to believe. During these past few weeks, it ...

I don’t claim to have the secret to knowing the truth. But I do know one of the secrets to not knowing the truth. That would be to look at all the facts, and only believe the ones that tell you that ...