Defensiveness or stress tolerance or problem solving are not objectivity

>A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens their ideological worldview. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence — that is, we engage in confirmation bias, giving credit to expert testimony we like and find reasons to reject the rest.

>Political scientists Charles Taber and Milton Lodge experimentally confirmed the existence of this automatic response. They found that partisan subjects, when presented with photos of politicians, produce an affective “like/dislike” response that precedes any sort of conscious, factual assessment as to who is pictured.

>In ideologically charged situations, one’s prejudices end up affecting one’s factual beliefs. Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, information that threatens your belief system — say, information about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment — can threaten your sense of identity itself. If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack.

If you are objective, you are not threatened by surprising new information, even if it might have some negative implications that jump to mind. You evaluate it against every other relevant information source you have on the topic, sometimes requiring more complex chains of information, and assign a level of trust to the new info.