Jennifer Jerit and Jason Barabas conducted a study that inspected the interaction between the information environment and the motivation to learn the information by constructing questions based off of low or high media coverage to either the Democrats or Republicans with information with positive or negative implications. They found that the level of knowledge for Democrats and Republicans was higher for information with positive implications for their party and lower for information with negative implications, namely, the proportion of correctly answered questions for Democrats varied from 0.41 to 0.45 for questions with positive implications and 0.35 for those with negative implications, with similar results for Republicans. To highlight the difference in how well a question was answered depending on its implication, 75% of Republican participants correctly stated that President Bush won Congress’ approval to use military force against Iraq (sheds party in a positive light), but only 43% of them were aware that the Bush Administration did not publicly release evidence of Iraq’s involvement in the planning and funding of 9/11 attacks (not so positive). The results from this political study clearly display that one is more willing to learn facts that are consistent with their views and less willing to learn facts that challenge them. Similarly, when Drew Weston, affiliated with the Department of Psychology and Department of Psychiatry at Emory University, and his team observed the reasoning processes that dedicated partisans undergo when viewing threatening information about their candidates and opposing candidates during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, they found that…
