Kahan’s work suggests that cognition exists on a spectrum, ranging from issues where the truth matters and our identities don’t to issues where our identities dominate and the truth fades in importance. One implication of an era where our political identities are becoming more sorted and more powerful is that it will bring with it a rise in identity-protective cognition, and that’s particularly true if the relevant identity groups are able to construct sophisticated architectures of information that we can use to power our reasoning.
Next step- political alignment in areas where you would think there ought to not be, such as a legitimately deadly pandemic vs personal freedoms, and what the appropriate response is to a global issue such as global warming
