Does your political persuasion shape your experience of the world?

Does your political persuasion shape your experience of the objective world (or perhaps the opposite)?



http://www.startribune.com/science/284047341.html

Quote:

Partisan disagreement about the relationship between climate change and weather extremes has become pretty routine. But a study in Nature Climate Change puts it in a fascinating new light. The research suggests the climate issue may have become so politicized that our very perceptions of the weather are subtly slanted by political identities and cues. The paper — by sociologists Aaron McCright of Michigan State University, Riley Dunlap of Oklahoma State and Chenyang Xiao of American University — examined people’s perceptions of the winter of 2012, which was anomalously warm (the fourth warmest on record for the contiguous U.S.). Comparing Gallup polling results from early March 2012 (just after the winter ended) with actual temperature data from the lower 48 U.S. states, the researchers analyzed people’s perceptions of the warmth of the winter they’d just lived through in light of the temperature anomalies that actually occurred. In general, people accurately perceived that their weather had been pretty out of whack. But then, things got a little strange. It was no surprise that temperatures predicted people’s perceptions of temperatures, but what was surprising is the other factors that also shaped their assessment of how warm it was. The researchers found that political party affiliation had an effect — “Democrats [were] more likely than Republicans to perceive local winter temperatures as warmer than usual,” the paper reports. (…) It’s important to underscore how weird this is: Your politics and climate beliefs should not — you would think — change your experience of weather itself. Yet these data suggest that whether people actually physically feel differently, or whether they remember and reconstruct their weather experiences differently, worldview is having a role. “It suggests to me that people have begun to filter their fundamental perceptions of what is going on at least partly through a partisan frame,” Dunlap said…

Full article at top link.



Here’s a link to the actual paper: “The impacts of temperature anomalies and political orientation on perceived winter warming” - http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journ...imate2443.html



I have to wonder how much this type of phenomena impacts the polarization (and vice versa) in our nation today? Not just with regard to climate change but with a variety of different polarized topics (e.g. gun control, abortion, etc.,). The first inclination among many on both sides of these issues is to say that the other side is “denying reality,” and that they are somehow disingenuous in their perceptions and positions.



My question is how do we ever find common/middle ground when each side literally seems to perceive the same objective facts in completely opposite ways?

via International Skeptics Forum http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=285916&goto=newpost