Evidence that challenged the identification — the accent, the eye color, the face — was processed with very high standards: only evidence that was entirely irrefutable would override the motivated conclusion.

The trafficking narrative provided a ready mechanism for applying these high standards: each piece of challenging evidence could be attributed to the experiences he had supposedly undergone, and accepting this attribution required believing the trafficking story, which required only a willingness to believe — which the motivated reasoning was already providing.

This is not a unique failure of Carey Gibson’s judgment.

It is how human cognition works under these conditions, and laboratory research has replicated the same patterns across many different kinds of motivated reasoning situations.