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Beyond confirmation bias
The pattern is called motivated reasoning, and it is bigger than confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is noticing things that support a belief you already hold and missing things that contradict it. Motivated reasoning adds a drive to confirm those beliefs, and that drive shapes how all incoming information gets processed.
Two articles
Take an article whose politics match yours: it seems like a really smart article. An article that disagrees gets picked apart. The sample is too small, it left out other data, it asked the wrong questions, the author isn't reliable, and the whole thing is biased. Nobody runs that process on the articles that agree.
The uncertainty in real-world data makes this easy. Hidden information and luck leave enough room to read nearly any result in a way that feels right about what a person already believes.
What do studies show about judging evidence we dislike?
In 1979, Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper gave supporters and opponents of the death penalty two studies, one backing each side. Each group rated the study matching its own view as better conducted and more convincing. After reading both, the two groups ended up further apart than before. The pattern is called attitude polarization.
Can two people watch one game and see different fouls?
After a rough football game between Dartmouth and Princeton in 1951, psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril showed film of it to students at both schools. Princeton students counted far more Dartmouth infractions than Dartmouth students did. Their 1954 paper, titled They Saw a Game, became a classic in social psychology. Both groups had watched the same film.
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