So I listen to a few of Ezra Klein's NYT podcasts. He had on a doc to discuss long COVID. A relatively young woman and acknowledged specialist. So Ezra was trying to pull out some clarity around all the conflicting reports around long covid prevalence. At one point he challenged some of the estimates that long covid was in the 20-40% range of cases by noting that he already personally knew dozens of people who had by now had covid and no-one had seen any long covid. So she immediately launched into the typical liberal cant about Erza being upper class and systemic racism and classism and medical care access and sexism etc etc so of course it was there and he didn't see it. OK fine. But then not even 5 minutes later, she's going on about how the ER she works in sees people from every strata, race, and economic quartile and she's arguing strongly that long covid respects no class or race or socio-economic boundaries and that there is no data that supports that it does. Hmmmm wait...wut?
So it was weird. This scientific person falling into a more or less rote political screed response to a 'trigger' question, when on her own subsequent testimony she argues it had zero validity. But it is exactly what you are talking about. She had a set of beliefs she wanted to defend and promulgate, and projected them into a situation where her own research and experience denied the truth of the specific application, but she seemed blissfully unaware of what she had done, and since she had in the end validated Erza point he didn't press her on her self-contradiction. (And the ethos of his podcasts are not adversarial anyway, though I'm certain he must have picked up what happened as well as I was able to!) So obviously, this is not to deny there are huge institutional racism and socio-economic effects on public health in general in the US. That is not my point at all. But she so believed in that (again -which is fine in general) that she immediately extrapolated it to where she actually knew at a different intellectual level that it didn't apply. That is what I would call a perfect example of emotional 'reasoning'. The human mind is an odd thing.