"How politics makes us stupid": Ezra Klein's hypothesis, Chait's case study

Serendipity. On one sunny Sunday, Jonathan Chair purported to explain the controlling dynamic in U.S. politics. And Ezra Klein purported to explain the controlling dynamic in politics, period. Their hypotheses are congruent.

Klein deployed social science research from a team led by Yale law professor Dan Kahan demonstrating that all of us actively resist evidence that challenges our assumptions. In matters of passion and identity, we almost literally can't see contrary evidence. Exhibit A is an experiment in which people who had already demonstrated their ability to use math to arrive at a counterintuitive conclusion disabled that capacity when it threatened to undermine a political conviction.

In Kahan's experiment, people who had previously parsed data about the effectiveness of a skin cream were shown similarly presented data about the effectiveness of gun control. And, lo: