One thing we must see about ourselves is that we are never neutral when we look at evidence. We never deal with pure facts. We always look at facts through our own grid, our own paradigm, through our own biases. That is why two people can see the same facts and come to different conclusions.
For example, in the 1940’s Harvard psychologists Gordon Allport and Leo Postman conducted a study on rumors with a group of white men. They showed the first white man a picture and he was to describe the picture to the next man, who would describe it to the next, and so on, until it made it around the circle. The picture showed a scene on a subway with a black man in a three-piece suit being threatened by a white man with a razor.
However, by the time the story made it around the circle, the white man was in the suit and the black man was holding the razor. Why? Because, at that time in white America, and probably today, our bias is to believe that the white man wears the suit and the black man holds the razor. The biases of those in the group affected the way they saw “the facts.” Your assumptions, what you believe, determine what you see.