alt Hacker NewsThere's a strange pattern of die hard obstinence, even in the face of basic and common facts that we as as society until fairly recently all agreed upon. The reason is that works, if you admit fault/guilt then the usual consequences follow. If they remain obstinate, there's a chance they can project their crime on someone else which doesn't really work except it does retain for them a certain level of public support, from those who "see" what they want to see.
It's devastating society.
I think there's a real deficit in research on and understanding motivated cognition, and a lot of blurriness about attitudes versus belief versus perception. I don't just mean anything political, I mean things including physical pain and all sorts of things. When someone states something, it's very difficult to distinguish between "this is honestly what I saw or felt" versus "this is what I wanted to see or feel". When you get into the fact that consensus can be wrong, it leads to all sorts of issues.
It would be nice to have some kind of way to discriminate at what point in the percept -> attitude -> construal chain (which is probably more of a feedback loop) we are.