False Flags And Motivated Reasoning

 They're similar.

Regarding the leak of the Supreme Court opinion on Roe/Casey.  Motivated reasoning suggests that people on the left are happy about the leak.  They've been mostly saying that the leak is either good or no big deal compared to the importance of the document itself.  They like that it happened, so they think it was a good thing that it was done.

My Tweet to a leftist who thought a conservative did the leaking...

If we put any credence to the wisdom of crowds:

Most of the criticism of the leak has come from the right and most of the leak apologetics has come from the left.

Human nature, is to support what you think helps your side.

It seems like more on the left are changing over to the "A conservative did it" side.  What this tells me is that they now think it will hurt their cause, so it therefore wasn't done by anybody on their side.  I don't know about that: People do stupid and counter-productive things all the time.  The leak came from one person.  This person clearly violated professional ethics, so I don't see much reason to think they had perfect insight into the actual consequences.

A similar kind of thing happened  right before Trump was elected President in 2016:

• "Just before the 2016 election, the 111-year-old Hopewell Baptist Church was attacked with fire and graffiti that said, “Vote Trump.”

Naturally, every Democrat (who expressed an opinion) had full confidence it was a Trump supporter who did this vile act.  Every Republican (and some moderates) thought it was an obvious false flag.  Which did in fact turn out to be the case.

"Turns out the arsonist was Andrew McClinton, 48, an African-American member of the church."

People were pretty certain and confident in their positions.  I bet a former coworker $100 in a Facebook exchange, which was completely polite, that it would turn out to have been done by someone who wasn't a Trump supporter.  I was immediately "unfriended".