Comment by clairity

here's another point i forgot to bring up earlier that i'm just gonna hang off of here...

getting caught up in a side means you can't pick and choose from the whole menu of ideas out in the world. it means that if you're against abortion, you must be for guns (or vice versa), lest you suffer cognitive dissonance and social anxiety. that's exactly how political parties, pundits, the media, and partisans of all stripes get twisted up into contradictory positions, but can never extricate themselves, because they'd have to acknowledge a modicum of reasonableness coming from "the other side". it's pretty silly to get so tied up in a tribal affiliation that you shut down your own thinking that way.

this is actually the topic of the linked paper (i.e., culturally motivated reasoning), which was hardly discussed at all in these comments.