How political partisanship can shape memories and perceptions of identical protest events

It is well-recognized that increasingly polarized American partisans subscribe to sharply diverging worldviews. Can partisanship influence Americans to view the world around them differently from one another? In the current research, we explored partisans’ recollections of objective events that occurred during identical footage of a real protest. All participants viewed the same 87-second compilation of footage from a Women’s March protest. Trump supporters (vs. others) recalled seeing a greater number of negative protest tactics and events (e.g., breaking windows, burning things), even though many of these events did not occur. False perceptions among Trump supporters, in turn, predicted beliefs that the protesters’ tactics were extreme, ultimately accounting for greater opposition to the movement and its cause. Our findings point to the possibility of a feedback loop wherein partisanship underlies different perceptions of the exact same politically relevant event, which in turn may allow observers to cling more tightly to their original partisan stance.