Bias and Belief
This chapter introduces key psychological concepts pertinent to denial, such as cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, and confirmation bias. It also addresses the relation between denial and ideology. It explains different social psychology approaches to understanding the phenomena of denial and ideological denialism. Ideological denialism is a unique psychological condition wherein the subject is motivated to embrace a certain conclusion about issues of public relevance for reasons relating to self-interest, group-interest, culture, personality, and/or identity. A discovery of great importance is that the tendency to ideological denial is neither a consequence of being uninformed nor a consequence of one’s lacking political sophistication.