Parties Tell Us What is True: Partisan Differences in Knowledge of Facts.

The theory of motivated political reasoning indicates that people’s motives fall into two broad categories: (1) accuracy, where people seek to reach a correct or accurate conclusion, and (2) partisan, where people apply their reasoning as a defense of a prior conclusion. We utilize these dual motivations in a study of three areas of partisan dispute over factual information â€" WMD’s, the origins of global warming, and the origins of humans. First, we ran additive models and results predictably showed that education drastically reduced the likelihood of believing that WMD’s existed in Iraq, enhanced the chance of attributing global warming to human activity, and increased the probability of accepting as fact that humans evolve. Further the partisan motive led to predictable differences on these conclusions. Democrats did not believe WMD existed, did in fact believe in evolution, and consider human behavior as cause of global warming. Next, a series of interactions were performed between the motives and we find sevidence that partisan motives prevail over accuracy. For example, partisan identification conditioned the impact of education on the likelihood of believing Iraq had WMD: ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]