Couple recent articles on the subject:
Researchers tackle information avoidance and partisan divide Research suggests Americans are not only amidst a partisan divide, but they’re avoiding information — Lauren Griffin and Annie Neimand, The Conversation
This is what Trump voters said when asked to compare his inauguration crowd with Obama’s
Excerpt from the second article:
Here’s how we did our research
On Sunday and Monday, we surveyed 1,388 American adults. We showed half of them a crowd picture from each inauguration (see below) and asked which was from Trump’s inauguration and which was from Obama’s.
If the past is any guide, we would expect that Trump supporters would be more likely to claim that the picture with the larger crowd was the one from Trump’s inauguration, as doing so would express and reinforce their support for him. Further, as some respondents had never seen these photos, uncertainty regarding the answer would likely lead them to choose the photograph that would be most in line with their partisan loyalties.
For the other half, we asked a very simple question with one clearly correct answer: “Which photo has more people?” Some of these people probably understood that the image on the left was from Trump’s inauguration and that the image on the right was from Obama’s, but admitting that there were more people in the image on the right would mean they were acknowledging that more people attended Obama’s inauguration.
Would some people be willing to make a clearly false statement when looking directly at photographic evidence — simply to support the Trump administration’s claims?
Yes.
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