Can Psychology explain the victory of Donald Trump and the rising polarisation that seem to have extended around the Western world? The New Yorker did a research on different experts and psychology papers to see if it can be 'scientifically' demonstrated.  

One of the first papers researched is a case published in 1979 by a team of psychologists  from Stanford University that made sense of an un explored phenomenon: that the beliefs we hold already affect how we process and assimilate new information. In other words, we don’t learn rationally, taking in information and then making a studied judgment. Instead, the very way we learn is influenced from the onset by what we know and who we are. I

Read more in The New Yorker.