New research challenges a major theory about political bias

When people encounter political fact-checking that challenges their deeply held views, they routinely reject the information. A widespread psychological theory suggests this happens because voters want to avoid the mental discomfort of being wrong, yet a recent study found that strategies to manage emotions do not actually reduce this partisan divide. The research, published in the journal Politics and the Life Sciences, indicates that our tendency to discard uncomfortable truths might not be driven by a desire to regulate our feelings.

People naturally process information in a way that protects their existing beliefs. Psychologists refer to this behavior as motivated political reasoning. Instead of acting like impartial judges weighing the evidence as it comes in, individuals often act like defense attorneys building a case for their chosen side. The result is a sharp divide in how different political groups perceive basic reality. This phenomenon is a major concern for democratic societies. When citizens cannot agree on basic facts, it becomes exceedingly difficult to hold elected officials accountable for their actions.

For decades, many political scientists have suspected that this persistent bias serves a specific psychological purpose. The dominant idea is that believing information that contradicts an established worldview causes cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a stressful, uncomfortable state of mental tension that occurs when a person holds conflicting ideas. To relieve this internal tension, the theory goes, people simply reject the inconvenient fact. In this view, motivated reasoning is fundamentally an exercise in emotion regulation. It is a defense mechanism deployed to minimize negative feelings and maximize positive ones.

Filip Kiil, a researcher at the Copenhagen Business School, wanted to put this exact explanation to the test. If motivated reasoning is truly just a tool for managing distress, then how people generally handle their personal emotions should influence how they process political facts. Kiil focused his investigation on two specific ways people deal with their feelings. One method is cognitive reappraisal. This involves changing how you think about a stressful situation to lessen its emotional impact. The second method is emotional acceptance. This approach means noticing and embracing uncomfortable feelings without making any attempt to escape them.

If the emotion regulation theory is accurate, these everyday emotional habits should reliably predict political bias. Someone who is highly skilled at emotional acceptance should be able to sit with the discomfort of reading an opposing political fact without needing to instantly reject the information. As a result, they should be much more willing to accept cross-partisan truths. Conversely, someone who frequently uses cognitive reappraisal should be highly proficient at spinning information to protect their feelings. This habit should lead to a much larger gap in how they view agreeable versus disagreeable facts.

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To investigate these psychological dynamics, Kiil conducted three separate online surveys involving more than 4,100 voters in Denmark. The surveys focused exclusively on immigration policy. Immigration is a highly polarizing and emotionally charged issue in Danish politics. In the first study, participants answered questions designed to measure their natural tendency to use emotional acceptance in their daily lives. They then evaluated a series of factual claims about immigration. Half of these claims were attributed to left-wing politicians, while the other half were attributed to right-wing politicians.

The factual claims included topics like the welfare costs of non-western immigration or the rates of support for gender equality among immigrant populations. The participants exhibited the standard markers of partisan bias. On average, they were about 31 percentage points more likely to believe a factual statement that supported their political leanings compared to one that challenged them. When Kiil analyzed the participants’ emotional habits, he found absolutely no association between emotional acceptance and their ability to believe disagreeable facts. People who were highly accepting of their negative feelings were just as likely to reject inconvenient political information as anyone else. Being comfortable with personal anxiety did not translate into an acceptance of different political realities.

Because evaluating political statements can be influenced by the perceived credibility of the source, Kiil designed a second study to eliminate that variable. In this setup, all the factual claims presented to the participants were entirely true. In addition, they were attributed to an authoritative, non-partisan expert organization called Statistics Denmark. The researcher also changed the study from an observational survey into an active experiment. Half of the participants listened to a short audio recording that guided them through a specific exercise in emotional acceptance. The audio instructed them to focus on unpleasant physical sensations and simply let go of the struggle against them. The control group listened to an audio clip designed to induce a normal, wandering state of mind.

After the audio exercises, both groups evaluated factual statements that directly contradicted their personal stance on immigration. The audio exercise successfully increased the participants’ momentary state of emotional acceptance, according to a follow-up survey question. Even so, this heightened state of acceptance had no effect on whether they believed the uncomfortable political facts. Kiil also surveyed participants about their use of cognitive reappraisal in this second study. He found that a habit of automatically spinning situations to feel better was entirely unrelated to how they judged the political statements.

A third and final study confirmed these unexpected patterns. Kiil randomly assigned a new group of participants to read facts attributed either to partisan politicians or to neutral experts. Once again, individuals evaluated agreeable facts much more favorably than disagreeable ones, showing a persistent divide. In this final test, emotional acceptance failed to reduce the partisan gap, regardless of who provided the information. The results for cognitive reappraisal were the exact opposite of what the emotion regulation theory predicted. Instead of widening the partisan gap, a natural tendency for cognitive reappraisal actually narrowed it slightly. Those who routinely changed how they thought about stressful scenarios in everyday life were slightly more likely to believe the uncomfortable political data.

Across all three tests, the results consistently failed to support the idea that voters reject political facts specifically to regulate their emotions. The findings pose a direct challenge to the widespread assumption that avoiding psychological pain is the main fuel driving political bias. While emotion regulation interventions have successfully increased political tolerance or support for compromise in other research contexts, they do not appear to act as a remedy for basic factual disagreements.

If managing mental discomfort does not drive this dismissive behavior, something else must be responsible. One alternative psychological explanation is that our brains are simply wired to link certain concepts with positive or negative feelings on an automatic basis. This perspective, known as the affective contagion model, suggests that discarding opposing facts is an unconscious reflex built into the very architecture of human memory. In that model, conscious attempts to process or accept feelings would not make a difference, because the subjective bias happens instantly behind the scenes.

The study has defined boundaries. The research specifically examined Danish voters reading about a single, highly specific political issue. It remains entirely possible that emotion regulation plays a larger role in different political contexts, with different populations, or regarding different policy issues. Future research might also explore whether individuals use more subtle mental tricks to protect their worldview. For instance, a voter might accept a disagreeable fact as true but quietly diminish its overall importance, sparing their feelings without outright denying reality.

Whatever the underlying mechanism turns out to be, this research suggests that simply teaching citizens to tolerate negative emotions will not cure the problem of political misinformation. Finding a way to get voters to agree on basic facts will require deeper exploration into how the human mind categorizes political reality.

The study, “Motivated political reasoning: Testing the emotion regulation account in the case of perceptual divides over politically relevant facts,” was authored by Filip Kiil.