The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Your political preference determines the arguments that you find compelling. If you like the current health policy, you believe its benefits are substantial and its costs more manageable than the costs of alternatives. If you are a hawk in your attitude toward other nations, you probably think they are relatively weak and likely to submit to your country’s will. If you are a dove, you probably think they are strong and will not be easily coerced. Your emotional attitude to such things as irradiated food, red meat, nuclear power, tattoos, or motorcycles drives your beliefs about their benefits and their risks. If you dislike any of these things, you probably believe its risks are high and its benefits negligible.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. Random House Canada, 2011. p. 103
Trump voters feel very differently about things now that he’s won, our new poll shows
https://www.politico.com/poll-trump-voters-opinion-fraud-economy
Donald Trump’s supporters thought voter fraud could determine the election outcome — until he won.
Heading into Election Day, nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters said fraud was a serious issue. Afterward, just a bit over one-third said so.
Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris has scrambled public opinion about a range of other issues, too. For example, his supporters were also more likely to feel good about the economy after the election — while Harris supporters adopted a more negative outlook.
Those are among the results of a new POLITICO|Morning Consult poll, designed to measure change in public opinion before and after the election. The results largely track with recent consumer sentiment data and comments from Republican leaders.
“A week before the election, just 8 percent of self-identified Trump voters described the economy as on the “right track,” the polling found. But after Trump’s victory, that number swung to 28 percent — still a minority, but a substantial swing in a span of just a few weeks when economic conditions did not change dramatically.
On the flip side, Harris supporters were far less likely to say the economy was on the right track after the election, with just 46 percent saying so, down from 59 percent the week before Election Day.”
“Are we falling out of love with nonfiction?” asked a much-circulated Guardian piece published late last year. Data from a NielsenIQ report found the UK’s nonfiction print sales had dipped by 6 percent. “Speaking to publishing insiders and readers,” wrote Emma Loffhagen, “one word that cropped up repeatedly was escapism.” Two weeks later, the New York Times confirmed that “Dragons, Sex, and the Bible” were the top categories that drove US book sales in 2025. The world is on fire; why not sit back and watch some mythical creatures—and also, I guess, cousins—get it on?
The numbers certainly back this theory up. “Like an axe to a tree” is how one editor at a major publisher, who works primarily on adult nonfiction, describes the effect of the 2024 US election on sales: people were so emotionally walloped by the outcome that they flocked to genres that clearly offered pleasure and distraction. But despite the critical hit, some branches of the tree continue to thrive.
Allison Devereux, an agent who leads the nonfiction program at Trellis Literary Management, sees reader appetite clustering around two poles: self-help and books that take you “out of real life for a while,” whether through a deep emotional experience (like Chloe Dalton’s memoir Raising Hare, about rearing a wild leveret) or a tale that feels stranger than fiction (à la Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea, chronicling a young couple’s unlikely survival on a life raft after a shipwreck). What readers have cooled on, she says, is learning about social systems and structures. Such curiosity burned brightly during the unrest of summer 2020 and the first Trump administration. But that innate desire to understand doesn’t exist anymore, she says; the news is too chaotic. “We don’t need to read the first draft of history as we’re living it.”
https://thewalrus.ca/nonfiction-is-struggling-publishers-are-making-it-worse/