There was a paper recently that found people did poorly in math problems if the naive, wrong solution confirmed their political views: http://papers.ssrn.com/so

There was a paper recently that found people did poorly in math problems if the naive, wrong solution confirmed their political views: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2319992 It's been making its rounds in the popular media with headlines like "Politics makes you dumb".