David Brooks has an excellent op-ed in the NYT on partisanship. It's as balanced a piece as you'll find anywhere, and it's backed by real data. This is a pet interest of mine, as it's a pervasive cognitive phenomenon. People create a model of the world and then select data which reinforces it. Man is a rational animal only occasionally.

I think it was Heinlein (via Lazarus Long) who said that "Man isn't a rational animal, he's a rationalizing animal."

Andrew,

Or as someone else said (I think it was Simon and
Garfunkel in their song "The Boxer"):

"A man hears what he wants to hear and he disregards the rest."