When people encounter political fact-checking that challenges their deeply held views, they typically reject that information. Popular psychological theory holds that this happens because voters want to avoid the psychological discomfort of being wrong, but recent research has found that emotion management strategies don’t actually reduce this partisan divide. The study, published in the journal Politics and the Life Sciences, shows that our tendency to abandon uncomfortable truths may not be driven by a desire to control our emotions.
People naturally process information in ways that protect their existing beliefs. Psychologists call this behavior motivated political reasoning. Rather than acting like impartial judges weighing the evidence presented, individuals often act like defense attorneys litigating cases on behalf of their chosen side. As a result, there are significant differences in how different political groups perceive fundamental realities. This phenomenon is of great concern to democratic societies. When the public cannot agree on basic facts, it becomes extremely 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 prevailing idea is that cognitive dissonance occurs when we believe information that contradicts our established worldview. Cognitive dissonance is a stressful and unpleasant state of mental tension that occurs when a person has conflicting thoughts. The theory is that to alleviate this internal tension, people simply reject inconvenient facts. From this perspective, motivated reasoning is essentially an exercise in emotional regulation. This is a defense mechanism deployed to minimize negative emotions and maximize positive emotions.
Copenhagen Business School researcher Philip Keel wanted to test this exact explanation. If motivated reasoning is truly just a tool for managing distress, then how people generally handle personal emotions should influence how they process political facts. Keel’s research focused on two specific ways people deal with their emotions. One method is cognitive reappraisal. This involves changing the way you think about stressful situations to reduce their emotional impact. The second way is to embrace your emotions. This approach means being aware of and accepting unpleasant emotions without trying to run away from them.
If emotion regulation theory is accurate, these everyday emotional habits should reliably predict political bias. People who are highly skilled at accepting emotions should be able to tolerate the discomfort of reading opposing political facts without immediately rejecting the information. As a result, they should be more willing to accept nonpartisan truths. Conversely, people who frequently use cognitive reappraisal should be highly skilled at weaving information to protect their emotions. This habit should lead to a much larger gap in how they view facts they agree with and facts they find unpleasant.
To explore these psychological dynamics, Kiel conducted three separate online surveys among more than 4,100 voters in Denmark. The study focused solely on immigration policy. Immigration is a highly polarizing and emotive issue in Danish politics. In the first study, participants answered questions aimed at measuring their natural tendency to engage in emotional acceptance in their daily lives. They then evaluated a series of factual claims about immigration. Half of these claims were made by left-wing politicians and the other half by right-wing politicians.
Factual arguments included topics such as welfare payments for non-Western immigrants and support for gender equality among immigrant populations. Participants showed standard indicators of partisan bias. On average, they were about 31 percentage points more likely to believe factual statements that supported their political leanings than those that disagreed with them. When Keel analyzed the emotional habits of his participants, he found that there was no connection between emotional acceptance and the ability to believe unpleasant facts. People who strongly accepted their negative emotions were just as likely to reject inconvenient political information as everyone else. Being comfortable with personal anxieties did not translate into acceptance of different political realities.
Because evaluations of political statements can be influenced by perceptions of a source’s credibility, Keel designed a second study to eliminate that variable. In this setting, all factual claims presented to participants were completely true. Moreover, they are attributed to an authoritative non-partisan expert organization called Statistics Denmark. The researchers also changed the study from an observational study to an active experiment. Half of the participants listened to short audio recordings that guided them through specific exercises for accepting their emotions. The voice instructed me to focus on unpleasant physical sensations and simply let go of my struggle against them. The control group listened to audio clips designed to induce a normal wandering mental state.
After the audio exercise, both groups evaluated factual statements that directly contradicted their personal positions on immigration. According to follow-up questions, the audio exercises were successful in increasing participants’ momentary emotional receptive state. Still, this heightened state of acceptance did not affect whether they believed uncomfortable political facts. Kiil also surveyed participants about their use of cognitive reappraisal in this second study. He realized that our habit of automatically changing situations to make ourselves feel better has nothing to do with how we judge political statements.
A third and final study confirmed these unexpected patterns. Kiil randomly assigned a new group of participants to read facts attributed to either partisan politicians or neutral experts. Once again, individuals evaluate facts they agree with much more favorably than facts they disagree with, indicating a deep division. In this final test, emotional acceptance did not reduce the partisan gap, regardless of who provided the information. The results of cognitive reappraisal were exactly the opposite of what emotion regulation theory predicted. Rather than widening, the partisan gap actually narrowed slightly due to the natural tendency for cognitive reappraisal. People who regularly changed their thinking about stressful scenarios in their daily lives were slightly more likely to believe unpleasant political data.
Across all three tests, the results consistently fail to support the idea that voters reject political facts specifically to control their emotions. This finding directly challenges the widespread assumption that avoiding psychological distress is the primary driver of political bias. Emotion regulation interventions have been successful in increasing support for political tolerance and compromise in other research settings, but they do not seem to work as a remedy for basic factual disagreements.
If managing emotional discomfort does not cause this rejection behavior, then something else must be causing it. One alternative psychological explanation is that our brains are simply wired to automatically associate certain concepts with positive or negative emotions. This perspective, known as the emotional contagion model, suggests that discarding contrary facts is an unconscious reflex built into the very structure of human memory. In this model, consciously trying to process or accept emotions makes no difference because subjective biases occur immediately behind the scenes.
This study has boundaries. This study specifically looked at what Danish voters read about a single, very specific political issue. It is still very possible that emotion regulation plays a larger role in different political contexts, different populations, or different policy issues. Future research could also investigate whether individuals use more subtle mental tricks to protect their worldview. For example, voters may accept an unpleasant fact as true, but quietly diminish its overall importance by preserving their emotions without denying the reality entirely.
Whatever the underlying mechanism, this study suggests that simply teaching the public to tolerate negative emotions will not solve the problem of political misinformation. Finding ways to get voters to agree on basic facts requires a deeper exploration of how the human mind categorizes political reality.
The study, “Motivated Political Reasoning: Testing the Emotion Regulation Account in the Case of Perceptual Split on Politically Relevant Facts,” was authored by Filip Kiil.
