March 9, 2023: Peter Ditto

(University of California, Irvine)

Partisan Bias and its Discontents

Do our political affinities bias how we interpret politically-relevant information? Most casual observers of the deeply polarized nature of contemporary American politics would likely respond “yes.” But in the fields of political science and political psychology, the existence of partisan bias has been a point of contention for decades. In this talk, I will discuss the conceptual and empirical challenges of documenting motivated political reasoning, offering some evidence of political irrationality, as well as a broadened conception of partisan bias as a social and moral process that complicates assessments of political rationality.