The Difference Between Political Psychology and Partisan Motivated Reasoning

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There's a lot of evidence around this in the book, but it ladders out to all kinds of different things. The more high information you are as a voter, what it tends to do is give you a lot of cognitive resources to convince yourself of why what your group believes or what you want to believe is already correct. If you've ever tried to argue with a climate change denier, something you will find is that they are often quite informed about some aspects of science. Oftentimes the reason they have very wrong views is because they're quite smart,. That is given them an incentive to go out and search for the wrong views or answers which will back them up in the wrong

People have always disagreed about politics, passionately and sometimes even violently. But in certain historical moments these disagreements were distributed without strong correlations, so that any one political party would contain a variety of views. In a representative democracy, that kind of distribution makes it easier to accomplish things. In contrast, today we see strong political polarization: members of any one party tend to line up with each other on a range of issues, and correspondingly view the other party with deep distrust. Political commentator Ezra Klein has seen this shift in action, and has studied it carefully in his new book Why We’re Polarized. We talk about the extent to which the apparent polarization is real, how we can trace its causes, and whether there’s anything we can do about it.

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Ezra Klein received a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently the editor-at-large and founder of Vox. As a writer and editor his work has appeared in/on The Washington Post, MSNBC, Bloomberg, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. Among his awards are Blogger of the Year (The Week), 50 Most Powerful People in Washington DC (GQ), Best Online Commentary (Online News Association), and the Carey McWilliams Award (American Political Science Association).