Who is more biased in US politics – democrats or republicans? The answer is – democrats think it’s the republicans, and the republicans think it’s the Democrats! This is what is known as partisan bias, in which the person or group of a particular political view act, interpret or promotes ideas that align with their ideological background.
There is a notion in political psychology which proposes that it is the conservatives that possess more bias in their view owing to their inability to update with changes that go around in the world. It led to the school of asymmetric partisan bias theory.
Ditto and coworkers (2019) did a meta-analysis of 51 experimental studies on the partisan bias. The studies included topics ranging from environmental to gun control, welfare to abortion. Interestingly, most of the study results showed overall biases with r values in the range of 0.2 – 0.3, which we know from an earlier post, is close to randomness. Naturally, the difference of r values between liberals and conservatives was also close to zero.
