Is Orin Kerr a “Refutation of the Phenomenon of Ideologically Motivated Reasoning?”

January 31st, 2012

Dan Kahan thinks so, or not. Can’t quite peel back the layers of snarkiness here.

Over at Volokh Conspiracy there’s an interactive poll that lets readers watch a video of the police tasing a D.C. Occupy protestor & then indicate whether the police were acting appropriately. The comments are great demonstration of how people with different ideological predispositions will actually see different things in a situation like this, a recurring phenomenon in the reactions to use of force by police against Occupy protestors. I’m pretty sure the author of the post — Orin Kerr, who’d be a refutation of the phenomenon of ideologically motivated reasoning if he weren’t a mere “N of 1”– designed the post to make readers see that with their own eyes regardless of what they “saw with their own eyes” in the video. Nice.