Would some people be willing to make a clearly false statement when looking directly at photographic evidence — simply to support the Trump administration’s claims?
Yes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/25/we-asked-people-which-inauguration-crowd-was-bigger-heres-what-they-said/?utm_term=.364f0c381a48&wpisrc=nl_politics&wpmm=1
fascinating:
But what’s even more noteworthy is that 15 percent of people who voted for Trump told us that more people were in the image on the left — the photo from Trump’s inauguration — than the picture on the right. We got that answer from only 2 percent of Clinton voters and 3 percent of nonvoters.
Even when the photographic evidence was directly in front of them and the question was straightforward, one in seven Trump supporters gave the clearly false answer.
Why would anyone give the wrong answer to a pretty simple question?
To many political psychologists, this exercise will be familiar. A growing body of research documents how fully Americans appear to hold biased positions about basic political facts. But scholars also debate whether partisans actually believe the misinformation and how many are knowingly giving the wrong answer to support their partisan team (a process called expressive responding).
Our survey question about which photo shows the larger crowd is that an incorrect response to this question could really only arise from that second process. If there were no political controversy, any respondent who took the time to look at the photographs would see more people in the image on the right than the one on the left.
Clearly, some Trump supporters in our sample decided to use this question to express their support for Trump rather than to answer the survey question factually.
