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Your Facts or Mine?

Chapter 5 commences Part II of the book, Causes. It reviews the well-demonstrated psychological mechanisms that lead citizens toward perceiving only a specific set of facts, all the while believing in their sophisticated and unbiased appraisal. A constellation of reinforcing mechanisms adds up to citizens projecting their priors onto their perceptions. The chapter provides a detailed review of the psychological foundations of fact perceptions. It begins by describing the power of personal knowledge (highlighting the notorious “dress controversy” of 2015) and continues to discuss the contributions of cognitive psychology, social psychology, the theory of motivated reasoning, and the perspective that “reasoning is for arguing.” It concludes that all of these literatures point to a powerful role for core values as shapers of reality perceptions, noting the lack of empirical studies that directly test that hypothesis.