wpkato wrote:https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

How can Republicans defend him? Cognitive dissonance? Plain partisan insanity? I just don't get it. When will they think of our country first?

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It is not your imagination — partisanship really does affect the way we understand evidence of a scandal and how we interpret that evidence. You can see that in the polls that came out this week, which show sharp divides between Democrats who overwhelmingly support impeachment proceedings and Republicans who overwhelmingly oppose them. You can also see it in the comments of politicians — while Democrats see obvious malfeasance in Trump’s pressuring the Ukrainian president to look into the Bidens, Republicans have called the conversation a “nothingburger” that Democrats are hyping as an excuse to reach a foregone conclusion. And while partisanship isn’t the only thing that creates those dueling realities, experts say it’s the biggest factor. And it probably matters more now than it did in the past.

There are many different personal factors that affect how people evaluate the evidence for or against a political scandal and what they think should be done about it. Gender — both the politician’s and the voters’ — is one example, said Nick Vivyan, a politics professor at the U.K.’s Durham University. He’s found evidence that female voters have more of an interest in punishing female politicians’ who misbehave, compared to how those same voters treat men. Male voters are also more likely to treat male politicians more leniently than they treat female ones. (This is just one of many structural reinforcements that makes the glass ceiling of politics so hard for American women to crack through.)

External social and political context also affect whether a scandal sticks and what impact it has. When Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth, studied Washington Post coverage of presidential scandals between 1977 and 2008, he found that controversies became news faster and were covered more extensively when presidents had lower approval ratings among opposition voters and when there was simply less happening in the news to distract the reporters.

Since 1980, our average feelings about “the other guys” have become significantly chilly — falling from around 50 to around 25 points on the 100-point scale. In fact, almost all the significant increase in affective polarization is due to an increased dislike of the other side and not, say, an increased preference for your own side.

That kind of emotional partisanship matters for scandals because it increases the likelihood of motivated reasoning — basically upping our tendency to not want to hear things that contradict our previously held beliefs. In the case of politics, that means finding reasons why the other side’s scandals are a very big deal and/or finding reasons why our own preferred party’s scandals are not.