Opinions About Facts - Partisan Asymmetries in Economic Assessments

Polarized beliefs about facts represent a challenge for standard theories of information
processing. Recent theoretical literature suggests that alternative forms of information
processing, such as belief-based utility and motivated cognition, lead to disagreement
on facts. Building on a theoretical model of motivated cognition, and developing a
novel, data-driven methodology to detect motivated cognition from observational data,
we show that partisan perceptions of economic conditions around the 2016 U.S. Presi-
dential election are consistent with motivated cognition: While Republicans perceived
the economy as worse than Democrats up until the election date, their perceptions
increase discontinuously and disproportionately to the economic upturn immediately
after the Republican win, whereas Democrats' perceptions remain by and large unchanged.
JEL Codes: D83, D84, Z13
Keywords: Motivated Beliefs, Partisanship, Identity, Survey Data, Polarization

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