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Rumors, Truths, and Reality: A Study of Political Misinformation
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... Most studies [3][4][5][6] are concerned with two aspects when studying rumors; rumor detection and rumor analysis. Rumor analysis is studied in multiple fields, including economics, psychology and social science, where rumors are classified based on different criteria, characteristics and dimensions. ...
... While examining the factors that lead people to believe and spread rumors, researchers have looked into the characteristics and contents of a rumor and have found that the length, sentiment and presence of pictures in a rumor affect people's intention to believe and spread the rumor [5]. One study by Schwarz et al. [6] found that the metacognitive experience of people -which is how easy it is to recall and understand new information based on how it is presented -leads them to believe or disbelieve a rumor; meaning that when statements are made easier to read by writing them in color, people will be more likely to accept these statements as true. ...
... One study by Schwarz et al. [6] found that the metacognitive experience of people -which is how easy it is to recall and understand new information based on how it is presented -leads them to believe or disbelieve a rumor; meaning that when statements are made easier to read by writing them in color, people will be more likely to accept these statements as true. Another study [5] found that people tend to support a rumor that is spread on Twitter before it has even been verified rather than deny it. ...
The spread of rumors has often been linked to major social and political impacts with consequences that oftentimes may prove to be severe. While there are multiple factors that could make a rumor more believable, this paper focuses on investigating the effects of personality traits on believing or disbelieving rumors. Participants were given a survey which included rumors relating to a single topic, COVID-19, to avoid topic-bias. Participants were also given a personality test which assessed the participants' traits based on the Big 5 Model and categorized them as high or low. The effect of valence (pleasure) and arousal (excitement) on believing or disbelieving rumors was also explored, along with how this effect differs from one trait to another. The results showed that people with high agreeableness tend to believe rumors more than people with low agreeableness and that there was a correlation between valence and believing rumors for people with high neuroticism and people with low agreeableness. No correlation was found between arousal and believing rumors for any of the personality traits.
... Rumors are unverified suggestions of fact related to a topic of interest [5], and are the oldest form of mass media [30]. The term rumor does not require that the information is untrue, however, the connotation used colloquially implies falsehood, and that is how we will use it throughout. ...
... The term "rumor" has different meanings in different contexts. Unverified propositions for beliefs related to a topic of interest and uncertain truths about an involved subject are both definitions of rumors [5]. Some researchers define rumors as claims of facts about people, groups, events, and institutions without any proof of being true [2]. ...
... Rumors can be classified into three basic types: (1) the pipe-dream or wish rumor, a circulated wishful thinking among a certain group of people; (2) the bogie rumor, a rumor that originates based on fear and anxiety; and (3) the wedge-driving or aggression rumor, based on hate and aggression [33]. Rumors transfer between people because people believe rumors are true information, [5]. ...
... These factors can influence beliefs in conspiracy theories. For example, party identification is associated with the endorsement of conspiracy theories that make the rival party look bad (e.g., Berinsky [30]). Enders and Smallpage [31] conduct an experimental study showing that conservative Republicans appear to be more susceptible to conspiratorial cues than progressive Democrats. ...
... Governments have always been at the center of conspiracy theories. Georgiou et al. [30] show that beliefs in conspiracies are correlated with more negative attitudes toward government's responses. In politics, conspiracies have always been hidden under the veil of power conflicts. ...
... Believing a conspiracy theory is one way of lowering them. Anxiety may be particularly acute if it is caused by a major external event, which may be a natural disaster or a human-caused event, such as a terror attack [30]. Conspiracy theories functionally provide very simple causal explanations for distressful events. ...
Along with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, beliefs in conspiracy theories are spreading within and across countries. This study aims to analyze predictors of beliefs in conspiracy theories. Because previous studies have emphasized only specific political, psychological, or structural factors or variables, this study constructs an integrated analytical model that includes all three factors. We analyze data from a large-scale survey of Koreans (N = 1525) and find several results. First, political, psychological, and structural factors influence beliefs in conspiracy theories. Second, when we examine the specific influences of the variables, we find that authoritarianism, support for minority parties, religiosity, trust in SNS (social networking services), perceived risk, anxiety, negative emotions, blame attribution, the quantity of information, health status, and health after COVID-19, all positively influence beliefs in conspiracy theories. Conversely, support for President Moon Jae-In’s government, Christianity, trust in the government, perceived control, analytic thinking, knowledge, the quality of information, and gender, all negatively impact these beliefs. Among the predictors, the quality of information, health status, support for President Moon Jae-In’s government, perceived risk, and anxiety have the most decisive impacts on beliefs in conspiracy theories.
... We also specified three eligibility criteria to identify relevant studies: (a) the presence of open-ended questions or closed-ended scale measures of participants' beliefs in (e.g., probability judgments about an event or person) or attitudes supporting (e.g., liking for a policy) the earlier misinformation and the debunking information, (b) the presence of a control group as well as one of the experimental groups (i.e., with or without the debunking message), and (c) the inclusion of a news message initially asserted to be true (the misinformation message) as well as a debunking message (see the Supplemental Material for details). Even though many topics involved real-world matters (e.g., see Berinsky, 2012, for the 2010 Affordable Care Act materials and Materials and Methods in the current Supplemental Material), the message positions were unfamiliar to the participants before the experiment. ...
... The same experiment was assigned a 3 for spontaneous generation of explanations because participants were instructed to complete an open-ended questionnaire with causal-inference questions (e.g., "What could have caused the explosions?"). In contrast, Berinsky's (2012) report included neither an explicit procedure to strengthen the reception of the misinformation nor questionnaires to induce inferences about the misinformation. Therefore, this report was assigned a 1 for both variables. ...
... In this column, ND indicates that there was no detailed debunking information, and D indicates that detailed debunking information was available. Eight reports used false social and political news, including reports of robberies (Ecker, Lewandowsky, Fenton, & Martin, 2014), the investigations of the warehouse fire (Ecker, Lewandowsky, Swire, & Chang, 2011;Johnson & Seifert, 1994) and traffic accidents (Ecker, Lewandowsky, & Apai, 2011;Ecker et al., 2010), the descriptions of death panels in the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Berinsky, 2012), positions of political candidates on arguments about Medicaid (Bullock, 2007), and whether a political candidate had received donations from a convicted felon (Thorson, 2013). Table 1 presents a summary of characteristics for each metaanalyzed condition. ...
This meta-analysis investigated the factors underlying effective messages to counter attitudes and beliefs based on misinformation. Because misinformation can lead to poor decisions about consequential matters and is persistent and difficult to correct, debunking it is an important scientific and public-policy goal. This meta-analysis (k = 52, N = 6,878) revealed large effects for presenting misinformation (ds = 2.41–3.08), debunking (ds = 1.14–1.33), and the persistence of misinformation in the face of debunking (ds = 0.75–1.06). Persistence was stronger and the debunking effect was weaker when audiences generated reasons in support of the initial misinformation. A detailed debunking message correlated positively with the debunking effect. Surprisingly, however, a detailed debunking message also correlated positively with the misinformation-persistence effect.
... Most existing work on misinformation focuses only on the third step: whether – and to what extent – individuals accept corrections of misinformation (Nyhan & Reifler 2010; Bullock 2007; Berinsky 2012). However, a narrow preoccupation with designing successful corrections ignores important additional consequences of misinformation on attitudes: for example, the creation of belief echoes. ...
... Understanding the circumstances under which a correction leads people to update their factual beliefs has been the focus of most existing work on misinformation (Nyhan & Reifler 2010, Bullock 2007, Berinsky 2012). In this dissertation, I use the term " belief persistence " to describe individuals' resistance to corrections, or unwillingness to discard false beliefs. ...
... In these cases, the correction will likely be even less successful in returning the attitude to its pre-‐misinformation state. It is often the most vivid false claims that tend to be repeated both in the news (Berinsky 2012) and in interpersonal conversation (Weeks & Southwell 2010): fertile ground for generating affective belief echoes. paying close attention. ...
The omnipresence of political misinformation in the today's media environment raises serious concerns about citizens' ability make fully informed decisions. In response to these concerns, the last few years have seen a renewed commitment to journalistic and institutional fact-checking. The assumption of these efforts is that successfully correcting misinformation will prevent it from affecting citizens' attitudes. However, through a series of experiments, I find that exposure to a piece of negative political information persists in shaping attitudes even after the information has been successfully discredited. A correction--even when it is fully believed--does not eliminate the effects of misinformation on attitudes. These lingering attitudinal effects, which I call "belief echoes," are created even when the misinformation is corrected immediately, arguably the gold standard of journalistic fact-checking.
Belief echoes can be affective or cognitive. Affective belief echoes are created through a largely unconscious process in which a piece of negative information has a stronger impact on evaluations than does its correction. Cognitive belief echoes, on the other hand, are created through a conscious cognitive process during which a person recognizes that a particular negative claim about a candidate is false, but reasons that its presence increases the likelihood of other negative information being true. Experimental results suggest that while affective belief echoes are created across party lines, cognitive belief echoes are more likely when a piece of misinformation reinforces a person's pre-existing political views.
The existence of belief echoes provide an enormous incentive for politicians to strategically spread false information with the goal of shaping public opinion on key issues. However, results from two more experiments show that politicians also suffer consequences for making false claims, an encouraging finding that has the potential to constrain the behavior of politicians presented with the opportunity to strategically create belief echoes. While the existence of belief echoes may also provide a disincentive for the media to engage in serious fact-checking, evidence also suggests that such efforts can also have positive consequences by increasing citizens' trust in media.
... increased our knowledge of the psychological and cultural dimensions of misinformation, but there is little research on how the present communications infrastructure has changed its political use and diffusion. The limitless capacity of the web and its indifference to quality have increased the spread and enhanced the authority of misinformation (Garrett, 2011), especially among partisans (Berinsky, 2011;Garrett and Danziger, 2011). ...
... Garrett and Danziger (2011) found that during the 2008 presidential campaign, replicating the stickiness factor, McCain supporters were far more likely to believe rumors about Democrats than Obama supporters, despite equal exposure to refutations. In a similar line of research, Berinsky (2011) found that higher levels of information among experimental subjects enhanced rumor control for both Republicanand Democratic-based rumors, but, like Garrett and Danziger, found that highinformation Republicans were less likely to reject rumors about Democrats. Rumors have the potential to increase polarization as exchanges among partisans lead to "informational cascades" (Easley and Kleinberg, 2010;Sunstein, 2010) that reinforce existing beliefs. ...
... We also find that the web contributes to polarization by the tendency of partisans on the right to hold fast to their beliefs. The stickiness of beliefs among Grand Old Party (GOP) partisans found by Berinsky (2011), Danziger (2011), andStroud (2011) provides a challenge to Democratic partisans. As websites expand in response to media coverage, searches may also increase as individuals become acquainted with the claim. ...
The World Wide Web has changed the dynamics of information transmission and agenda-setting. Facts mingle with half-truths and untruths to create factitious informational blends (FIBs) that drive speculative politics. We specify an information environment that mirrors and contributes to a polarized political system and develop a methodology that measures the interaction of the two. We do so by examining the evolution of two comparable claims during the 2004 presidential campaign in three streams of data: (1) web pages, (2) Google searches, and (3) media coverage. We find that the web is not sufficient alone for spreading misinformation, but it leads the agenda for traditional media. We find no evidence for equality of influence in network actors.
... People easily believe political misinformation with thinly evidence, regardless of their socioeconomic and political backgrounds [11]. As a result, misinformation can be spread quickly in such times, and it can be politically powerful forces [12]. Worse still, WeChat Moments' role in filtering information could provide an opportunity for users with the same information interests to touch and finally share the rumor [13]. ...
... The misinformation received from friends or family is more likely to be believed and shared with others, which leads to exhibit strong political biases [14]. In extreme cases, misinformation can make citizens form a more aggressive and violent opinion towards a certain political event [12], boost the spread of pages posted with hostile purpose and thus harm social stability. ...
... Understanding rumors diffusion pattern in online environments has been the focus of many studies in recent years [3]. However, isolating rumors from truths can be misleading without considering the spread of true information [4]. The way rumors spread is influenced by the absence of truths and truth presence could affect rumor diffusion. ...
... Rumor has different meaning in different contexts. Unverified propositions for beliefs related to the topic of interest and uncertain truths about an involved subject are known as rumors [4]. Some researchers believe rumors are claims of facts about people, groups, events, and institutions without any proof of being true [6]. ...
Social network sites give their users the ability to create contents and share it with others. During social crisis, the spread of false and true information could have profound impacts on users. Lack of prior studies to compare differences between diffusion patterns of rumors and truths during social crisis is the motivation of this study. In this study, we examine the role of information credibility, anxiety, personal involvement, and social ties on rumor and truth spread during social crisis. Building on the rumor theory, we propose a research model to examine differences between spread of rumors and truths. Using the Tweeter data collected during the Baltimore riots in 2015, we test the research model. Theoretical contributions and practical implications will be outlined based on the findings of the study. We anticipate findings will provide new avenues of research by determining characteristics of truths and rumors in online contexts.
... In the context of quick count election results, public opinion and acceptance of quick count results [or election results] can be motivated by individual political attitudes such as conspiracy theories, partisanship, as found by Vitriol & Marsh [8] in preference for the losing candidate. Several studies [8], [9] also found that this condition is apparent in sample with low political knowledge. ...
... Political awareness should be factual not subjective, which implies that a person may believe that he/she is politically aware, which in reality may not be true (Baber, 2020). Those who have political awareness tend to pay less heed to the rumors and fake news propaganda than those with little awareness (Berinsky, 2012). Banerjee and Haque (2018) stated that fake news in India spread like a wildfire and act as a catalyst for fueling nationalism but its biggest victim is truth. ...
Crowdfunding has seen a steep growth in the past decade. The basic principle of crowdfunding is fundraising from a large crowd. The political activities of a party or a candidate often require funds that are difficult to secure. In the 2008 campaign, Barak Obama raised around $500 million through crowdfunding. This study aims to examine the role of gender (through political interest, political efficacy, political awareness, and political party affiliation) in shaping the intention of people to participate in political crowdfunding (PCF) while measuring their level of political engagement. The study collected data from 374 respondents from India, the most populous democracy in the world. The results suggest that political interest and political awareness have a positive relationship with PCF participation. The study further reveals that the relationship is stronger in the case of women than in the case of men on these two parameters. The study also suggests that education can help promote women’s online political participation through crowdfunding. The study will be helpful for political parties/candidates and crowdfunding platforms to understand the factors that can boost fundraising campaigns through crowdfunding.
... Rumor rebuttal is a kind of anti-rumor persuasion behavior, and its essence is to produce correct information to effectively counteract the spread of rumors (Xiong, 2012). According to the persuasive information model (Hovland & Weiss, 1951), the characteristics of rumor rebuttal source (Berinsky, 2011;Bordia et al., 1998Bordia et al., , 2005DiFonzo & Bordia, 2000;Esposito & Rosnow, 1983;Tang & Lai, 2018;Wang et al., 2013, pp. 2-8;Zeng et al., 2019;Zeng & Wei, 2016, pp. ...
During public health emergencies, as one of the most effective rumor management strategies, rumor rebuttals depend on users' cognition, decision-making and interactive behaviors. Taking the dissemination of rumor rebuttals related to COVID-19 epidemic in the early stage in China as an example, we firstly adapted network analysis to construct representative networks of information and communication flow networks of users based on users' retweeting and commenting behaviors. Then quantitative indicators and exponential random graph models were used to evaluate the level of homophily based on topic and veracity in information networks, identity and standpoint in user networks. Meanwhile, chi square tests were added to compare the degree of echo chamber effect in retweeting and commenting. Findings showed that, users did show significant echo chamber effect when retweeting or commenting on rumor rebuttal information with different veracity. They showed diversification when retweeting but a certain tendency and pertinence when commenting in topic selection. Weibo's direct and open platform for retweeting and commenting broke the boundaries between stakeholders from different professional fields. However, the retweeting mechanism promoted self-isolation of users' standpoints, while the commenting mechanism provided an understanding and integrating channel for groups with opposing standpoints.
... seeing self-reinforcing patterns where none exist) or negative existential motives (e.g. alienation, Douglas et al. 2019 ;Clarke 2007 ); a deficiency in the ability to reason clearly or apply logic ( Ståhl and van Prooijen 2018 ); a propensity toward delusional ( Freeman 2007 ) or dogmatic thinking ( Berinsky 2012 ); or even experiences of hallucinations ( Dagnall et al. 2015 ). 7 Thus, fake news is emotional in the sense that it has very real, negative individual psychological correlates, creating individual disincentives to the collective action that meaningful democratic politics requires. ...
... People who are interested in politics and engaged with the political process are more politically aware of the political process [62]. People with high political awareness tend to spread fewer rumors and conspiracies than people with low political knowledge [63]. In the era of online media and fake news propaganda, citizens need to distinguish between factual and subjective political knowledge in order to participate meaningfully in the political process. ...
The study has integrated the civic voluntarism and planned behavior model to check the intentions of people towards political crowdfunding. Participation in politics is the civic duty of a citizen in a democratic country and exercising this right leads to government formation. Participation in the political process is behavior influenced by the intention to do so. The study examines the influence of the civic voluntarism model (CVM) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) factors on the intention to participate in political crowdfunding. The study was done in India, the largest democracy in the world, taking a sample size of 374 respondents. Partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze the data through SmartPLS-3.2. The results of this study revealed that resources-financial, time, and technological-are essential for participating in political crowdfunding. Political engagement, political interest, and political awareness are significantly associated with the intention to participate in crowdfunding. Online community engagement also shows a positive relationship with the intention. Among the three factors of TPB, attitude and subjective norms are significantly influencing the intention towards participation. The results of this study will help the political parties and candidates to identify factors that will help them to get maximum funding and support from the crowd through political crowdfunding. The theoretical implication is that political crowdfunding can come up as a distinct segment of crowdfunding to be studied.
... The survey found that Republicans were more inclined to support statements that represented Democrats poorly than the reverse (see Berinsky, 2012). ...
Voter-identification (ID) proponents claim that requiring voters to present photo-ID cards prevents fraud. Supported by a comprehensive empirical review, voter-ID opponents argue that significant voter fraud is nonexistent and that such restrictive laws suppress turnout of historically disenfranchised peoples. By analyzing testimonial letters to a state-legislature committee hearing, I show how repeating the false truth-claims can produce wide acceptance, through outright deception and cognitive biases. Focusing on the State of Kansas, my paper asks, “How do proponents of strict voter-ID laws frame their cases for relevant legislation?” and “Where does the research originate that they cite in state legislative hearings to support their claims?” From a content-analysis method of tallying critical words, phrases, and concepts, I tailored a discourse-analysis (DA) discipline. While analyzing grammatical structures, I focused more on the specific social, cultural, and political significances. Using terms and phrases such as “Those” “diseased” “Others” are “stealing Our way of life,” the political DA reveals that voter-ID proponents dehumanize the alleged perpetrators of voter fraud (often referenced as “illegals”). My five primary findings reveal how voter-ID proponents bolster their claims: arguing that their opponents willfully undermine democracy with voter fraud; fostering solidarity, dividing “Us” from the fraudulent voting “Others”; cultivating racism; manipulating legislators with urgent warnings; and buttressing their arguments with anecdotes, biased sources, and demonstrable lies. By revealing the persuasive powers of such discursive techniques, my paper provides a qualitative, critical nuance to the quantitative studies that address voter fraud.
Keywords: discourse analysis (DA), DA of racism, voter suppression, political DA, voter identification (ID), voter fraud, photo ID, voting restrictions
... Individuals might be motivated toward conspiratorial thinking by their personalities or circumstances, but most do not adopt such beliefs indiscriminately (Uscinski and Parent 2014). When people are exposed to information, whether it is correct or not, they filter it through their existing belief systems (Berinsky 2011;Lewandowsky et al. 2005). Even when individuals are exposed to arguments on both sides of an issue, they internalize or accept claims that allow them to preserve their existing perspectives or prior conclusions about the political world, as well as those that are consistent with their group identities (Kahan 2016;Lodge and Taber 2013). ...
A growing body of work has examined the psychological underpinnings of conspiracy theory endorsement, arguing that the propensity to believe in conspiracy theories and political rumors is a function of underlying predispositions and motivated reasoning. We show, like others, that rumor endorsement can also be a function of individuals’ group attitudes. In particular, among white Americans, birther beliefs are uniquely associated with racial animus. We merge this finding with other work which shows that rumors are more strongly endorsed by the individuals most motivated and capable of integrating them among their pre-existing attitudes and beliefs. We find, therefore, that it is white Republicans who are both racially conservative and highly knowledgeable who possess the most skepticism about Obama's birthplace.
... Political information. Since informed citizens are less likely to endorse CTs (Berinsky, 2012), we included a measure of political information. This was assessed using factual political-knowledge items (10 in Sample 1, 14 in Sample 2; e.g., Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). ...
Conspiracy theories about government officials and the institutions they represent are widespread, and span the ideological spectrum. In this study, we test hypotheses suggesting that system identity threat, or a perception that society's fundamental, defining values are under siege due to social change will predict conspiracy thinking. Across two samples (N=870, N=2,702), we found that system identity threat is a strong predictor of a general tendency toward conspiracy thinking and endorsement of both ideological and non‐ideological conspiracy theories, even after accounting for numerous covariates. We also found that the relationship between system‐identity threat and conspiracy‐theory endorsement is mediated by conspiracy thinking. These results suggest that conspiracy‐theory endorsement may be a compensatory reaction to perceptions that society's essential character is changing.
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... Researchers often explain the high amount of expressed belief in conspiracies as being not truthful responses; that is, they are "expressive responses" (Fischle 2000). An expressive response occurs when a survey respondent chooses an answer they believe is false because it permits them to express something else that they would like to say (Berinsky 2004). For example, if asked on a survey whether the mayor is corrupt, someone who does not like him or her will answer "yes" despite not really believing it. ...
I find that 10 percent of Americans believe in both “trutherism” and “birtherism.” Even among citizens who say they like Bush or Obama, or are from the same party, many still believe in conspiracies implicating the presidents. It is crucial to understand why so many Americans believe obviously erroneous conspiracies that denigrate a president who otherwise has their support. I predict that the authoritarian personality creates a predisposition to believe in conspiracies based on the tendency of those high in this trait to have greater anxiety and cognitive difficulties with higher order thinking. Using 2012 American National Election Study data, I find a clear and robust relationship between the authoritarian personality and conspiratorial beliefs. In all models, authoritarianism is a chief predictor for a predisposition toward both conspiratorial beliefs. This suggests that psychological propensities are an important explanation of why so many citizens believe in conspiracy theories.
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Does nationalism increase beliefs in conspiracy theories that frame minorities as subversives? From China to Russia to India, analysts and public commentators increasingly assume that nationalism fuels belief in false or unverified information. Yet existing scholarly work has neither theoretically nor empirically examined this link. Using a survey experiment conducted among 2,373 individuals and 6 focus groups with 6–8 participants each, for a total of 50 individuals, we study the impact of nationalist sentiment on belief in conspiracy theories related to ethnic minority groups in Pakistan. We find that nationalist primes – even those intended to emphasize the integration of diverse groups into one superordinate national identity – increase belief in statements about domestic minorities collaborating with hostile foreign powers. Subgroup analysis and focus groups suggest that nationalism potentially increases the likelihood that one views rights-seeking minorities as undermining the pursuit of national status.
Yeni enformasyon teknolojilerinin geliştirilmesi ile birlikte dezenformasyon ve yanlış bilgi içeren veri yığınlarının tarihin hiçbir döneminde olmadığı boyutlara vardığı bilinmektedir. Dünya çapında politika yapıcılar farklı biçimlerde bu süreçten etkilenmiştir. 2016 yılında ABD’de gerçekleştirilen seçimde yaşanan veri skandalları bu sürecin kırılma noktası olmuş, Brexıt vakasının ardından birçok yeni kavram ortaya atılmıştır. Dezenformasyon ve yanlış bilgi içeren verilerin yayılması kamusal alanda politika yapıcılar ile hizmet sağlayıcılar arasında yeni bir rekabet ve gerilim alanının ortaya çıkmasına neden olmuş, dünyada hükümetler, hükümet dışı örgütler, sivil toplumla birlikte özel girişimler tarafından dezenformasyon ve sahte bilgiyle mücadelede pek çok farklı yaklaşım ve pratik uygulama geliştirilmiştir. Bu makale; doğrudan bu yeni kavram, yaklaşım ve dezenformasyon ve sahte bilgiyle mücadelede geliştirilen uygulamaları incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaçla sahte içeriklere maruz kalmadan önce, maruz kaldıktan sonra ve dezenformasyon ağını analiz eden uygulamalar sistematik literatür taramasıyla analiz edilmiştir. Ayrıca, dünyanın farklı coğrafyalarında çeşitli ülkeler tarafından uygulanan politika girişimleri ve Türkiye’nin dezenformasyon ve yanlış bilgiyle mücadelede alabileceği olası önlemler incelenmiştir.
Many political observers have expressed doubts as to whether America's leaders are up to the task of addressing major policy challenges. Yet much of the critical commentary lacks grounding in the systematic analysis of the core institutions of the American political system including elections, representation, and the law-making process. Governing in a Polarized Age brings together more than a dozen leading scholars to provide an in-depth examination of representation and legislative performance. Drawing upon the seminal work of David Mayhew as a point of departure, these essays explore the dynamics of incumbency advantage in today's polarized Congress, asking whether the focus on individual re-election that was the hallmark of Mayhew's ground-breaking book, Congress: The Electoral Connection, remains useful for understanding today's Congress. The essays link the study of elections with close analysis of changes in party organization and with a series of systematic assessments of the quality of legislative performance.
Misinformation on social media in the 2019 general election not only reached people through forwarded WhatsApp messages, but often circulated online through legitimate political entities. Our research utilizes social media posts from an archive of fact-checked articles , circulated widely and classified as fake or dubious by fact-checking organizations, in the campaign period from early March to late May 2019. Our sample of stories posted by major parties across the political spectrum shows that they incorporated online misinformation into their campaign strategies, which included both lies about their opponents as well as propaganda and other positive-themed information to show themselves in a good light, with the vast majority (N = 41) from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress (INC); both parties were also sources and targets of misinformation. We discuss examples of misinformation as well as the predominant topics of BJP- and INC-targeted misinformation, including the campaign, corruption, religion, celebrity, nationalism, gender and development.
While research consistently shows that fact-checking improves belief accuracy, debates persist about how to best measure and interpret expressions of factual beliefs. We argue that this has led to ambiguity in interpreting the results of studies on fact-checking, including whether fact-checking effects in fact decrease confidently held false beliefs. In a two-wave, nationally representative online experiment on beliefs about immigration, we use a variety of theoretically motivated approaches toward observing the influence of fact-checking messages. Results suggest that the effects of fact-checking are robust to different methods of measuring misinformed beliefs – even after accounting for belief certainty – and across different analytical approaches. Effects are evident among those who harbored inaccurate beliefs with high degrees of confidence. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future studies of corrections and practical implications for fact-checking efforts.
Social Media and Democracy - edited by Nathaniel Persily September 2020
Previous research finds that misinformation is often difficult to correct once a person accepts it as truth. Nonetheless, a few studies have shown evidence that fact-checkers can help lower an individual’s susceptibility to believing false news and rumors. Our study builds on this research by examining the fact-checking inoculation effect on political misinformation (also known as “fake news”) that circulated on the Internet in the months following the election of President Donald Trump. Using an experimental design, we find only selected instances of inoculation effects. Instead, our results are consistent with previous studies that show individuals are more likely to accept or reject misinformation based on whether it is consistent with their pre-existing partisan and ideological beliefs. However, partisanship and ideology played a much stronger role in predicting believability for fake news stories critical of Democrats than stories critical of Republicans.
The current study is an attempt to establish a pure pragmatic perspective of the different pragmatic issues manifested in news reports and how news reporters exploit these issues to fulfill their goals of reporting news and presenting their reports in a tiptop manner. In other words, the study highlights the most prevalent pragmatic aspects that characterize news reports.
Scholarly efforts to understand conspiracy theories have grown significantly in recent years, and there is now a broad and interdisciplinary literature. In reviewing this body of work, we ask three specific questions. First, what factors are associated with conspiracy beliefs? Our review of the literature shows that conspiracy beliefs result from a range of psychological, political, and social factors. Next, how are conspiracy theories communicated? Here, we explain how conspiracy theories are shared among individuals and spread through traditional and social media platforms. Next, what are the societal risks and rewards associated with conspiracy theories? By focusing on politics and science, we argue that conspiracy theories do more harm than good. We conclude by suggesting several promising avenues for future research.
*** In press---Advances in Political Psychology ***
Scholarly efforts to understand conspiracy theories have grown significantly in recent years, and there is now a broad and interdisciplinary literature. In reviewing this body of work, we ask three specific questions. First, what factors are associated with conspiracy beliefs? Our review of the literature shows that conspiracy beliefs result from a range of psychological, political, and social factors. Next, how are conspiracy theories communicated? Here, we explain how conspiracy theories are shared among individuals and spread through traditional and social media platforms. Next, what are the societal risks and rewards associated with conspiracy theories? By focusing on politics and science, we argue that conspiracy theories do more harm than good. We conclude by suggesting several promising avenues for future research.
The average person possesses superficial understanding of complex causal relations and, consequently, tends to overestimate the quality and depth of their explanatory knowledge. In this study, we examined the role of this illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) in politics– inflated confidence in one's causal understanding of political phenomena– for endorsement of conspiracy beliefs. Utilizing a pre‐/post‐election panel design and a large sample of U.S. Citizens (N=394) recruited in the context of the 2016 Presidential Election, we provide evidence that political IOED, but not a non‐political IOED, was associated with increased support for general and election‐specific conspiracy beliefs, particularly among political novices and supporters of the losing candidate. We find this pattern of results net the influence of a broad range of variables known to covary with conspiracy beliefs. Implications for theory and the need for future research are discussed.
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The 2016 presidential election provided a unique opportunity to revisit two competing hypotheses for how voters establish their perceptions of electoral integrity. First, mass public opinion is believed to derive from elite messages. In the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump maintained that the election system was “rigged,” while election administration experts and officials received considerable media coverage in their efforts to counter Trump’s claims. Second, literature on voter confidence has established a “winner effect”—voters who cast ballots for winners are more likely than voters on the losing side to believe their vote was counted correctly. Thus, voters were exposed to two theoretically opposite effects. In this paper, we find that the “winner” effect mitigates the effects from strong pre-election cues from elites. We also show the effect of pre-election attention to the rigging issue, find a symmetry of the election outcome effect for winners and losers, and reconsider our explanations of the winner effect. Finally, we go beyond the existing studies of the winner effect to consider the kind of citizens who are most susceptible to that effect.
The presidential election process in a democratic country entails a political campaign that includes the spread of propaganda which refers to any information that aims to persuade voters to elect a candidate. This information may be in a form of a tagline or slogan that briefly explains why a candidate is running for office. Within the context of the 2016 Presidential Election in the Philippines, the purpose of this paper was to simulate through the Rumor Mill Model the spread of a presidential candidate’s tagline as propaganda; and to determine whether the speed and extent of propaganda reach was translated into votes. To accomplish this, a one-on-one correspondence of each presidential aspirant’s tagline, with the parameters of the model was created. A specific assumption for each parameter was formulated. Then based on the computer instructions of the model, the spread of propaganda was simulated. The result did not match with the official results of the 2016 Philippine presidential race. Hence, the Rumor Mill Model failed to predict who won in the election. It is therefore necessary to design additions and extensions to improve this model as an agent-based simulation model.
Key words: Rumor Mill Model, political propaganda, presidential election, tagline, Netlogo, Model
How do citizens' motivations shape their perceptions of poll reports? Increasingly, scholars are finding that citizens engage in motivated reasoning, whereby they discredit information that differs from their preexisting attitudes. The perceived credibility of opinion polls might be prone to similar motivational processes, as individuals could discredit results suggesting that they hold minority opinions. We assess whether motivated reasoning influences the credibility of poll results and whether features of the presentation of those results might moderate and potentially counteract these motivational processes. In an online survey experiment conducted with a national sample of American adults (N=1,211), respondents were exposed to poll reports about both gun control and abortion and were asked to rate the credibility of these polls. For each report, three aspects of presentation were randomized: the direction of the poll result (majority supports/opposes), the news source reporting the poll (FoxNews/MSNBC), and the amount of methodological detail reported (none/a lot). In line with theories of motivated reasoning, respondents who held issue positions that contradicted the results of the polls found those polls less credible. Further, this decreased credibility was particularly evident among individuals with high levels of political knowledge. Source credibility cues such as the ideological-alignment of source and respondent and the presence of a message from an unexpected source did not moderate this relationship and were unrelated to poll credibility. However, we found suggestive evidence that methodological disclosure could moderate the motivational biases in credibility assessments.
What do comparativists have to gain by reading recent work on China? In this article, I focus specifically on the ways in which scholarship on China can contribute to the task of theory building in comparative politics. I identify two areas that could reap particularly high benefits from considering scholarship on China—comparative political development and the political behavior of development—and I discuss some of the specific contributions that China scholarship can make to building comparative theory in these areas.
Given that most people believe in one conspiracy theory or another, this chapter examines how tethered to truth those beliefs are. It first explains why conspiracy theories are hard to disprove and discuss. It then defines some commonly used terms and phrases and makes the case for talking about conspiracy theories in as neutral a manner as possible. It next assesses several of the best tests for verifying the truth in conspiracy theories, arguing that there are at least six standards for evaluating conspiracy theories: Occam’s razor, falsifiability, the worst intentions test, the cui bono test, the eternal recurrence of the same test, and the impartial spectator test. Lastly, it makes the case that a full battery of these tests is the best method to evaluate the truth content of conspiracy theories.
Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? This study breaks from much previous research and attempts to explain conspiratorial beliefs with traditional theories of opinion formation. Specifically, we focus on the reception of informational cues given a set of predispositions (political and conspiratorial). We begin with observational survey data to show that there exists a unique predisposition that drives individuals to one degree or another to believe in conspiracy theories. This predisposition appears orthogonal to partisanship and predicts political behaviors including voter participation. Then a national survey experiment is used to test the effect of an informational cue on belief in a conspiracy theory while accounting for both conspiratorial predispositions and partisanship. Our results provide an explanation for individual-level heterogeneity in the holding of conspiratorial beliefs and also indicate the conditions under which information can drive conspiratorial beliefs.
Given the potential political and social significance of conspiracy beliefs, a substantial and growing body of work examines the individual-level correlates of belief in conspiracy theories and general conspiratorial predispositions. However, although we know much about the psychological antecedents of conspiracy endorsement, we know less about the individual-level political causes of these prevalent and consequential beliefs. Our work draws from the extant literature to posit that endorsement of conspiracy theories is a motivated process that serves both ideological and psychological needs. In doing so, we develop a theory that identifies a particular type of person-one who is both highly knowledgeable about politics and lacking in trust-who is most susceptible to ideologically motivated conspiracy endorsement. Further, we demonstrate that the moderators of belief in conspiracy theories are strikingly different for conservatives and liberals.
Selective news media exposure and political misperceptions have potentially troubling implications for democracy. In an online survey (N = 486) conducted in the context of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, we drew on a motivated reasoning framework to examine how rational and experiential engagement and need for closure were related to selective exposure and misperceptions. Because previous research has focused on conservative media and misperceptions that serve Republican causes, we also looked at how conservative and liberal media exposure were related to Republican- and Democratic-serving misperceptions among the overall sample as well as respondents of each party. Rational engagement had positive relationships with media use and (surprisingly) selective exposure among Democrats. It also was negatively related with Republican-serving misperceptions. Experiential engagement, on the other hand, had no relationships with media use but was positively related to Republican-serving misperceptions. Need for closure was positively related to Republican-serving misperceptions, but not after control variables were added. Finally, exposure to either kind of partisan media both discouraged misperceptions that served the opposing party and promoted misperceptions that served their own party, although the extent to which it did so appeared to vary depending on the partisanship of the media and of the audience. Implications of these findings for theory and policy are discussed. © 2015 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
Across three separate experiments, I find that exposure to negative political information continues to shape attitudes even after the information has been effectively discredited. I call these effects “belief echoes.” Results suggest that belief echoes can be created through an automatic or deliberative process. Belief echoes occur even when the misinformation is corrected immediately, the “gold standard” of journalistic fact-checking. The existence of belief echoes raises ethical concerns about journalists’ and fact-checking organizations’ efforts to publicly correct false claims.
Electoral campaigns are dynamic and an important change in recent elections is the growth of fact-checking; the assessment of the truthfulness of political advertisements by news media organizations and watchdog groups. In this article, we examine the role that fact-checks play in shaping citizens’ views of negative commercials and political candidates. We rely on an Internet survey experiment where we vary people’s exposure to negative advertisements and a follow-up fact-check article (i.e., no fact-check, accurate fact-check, inaccurate fact-check). The results of our experiment show that fact-checks influence people’s assessments of the accuracy, usefulness, and tone of negative political ads. Furthermore, sophisticated citizens and citizens with low tolerance for negative campaigning are most responsive to fact-checks. The fact-checks also sway citizens’ likelihood of accepting the claims made in the advertisements. Finally, negative fact-checks (e.g., fact-checks challenging the truthfulness of the claims of the negative commercial) are more powerful than positive fact-checks.
This paper studies, theoretically and empirically, the role of overconfidence in political behavior. Our model of overconfidence in beliefs predicts that overconfidence leads to ideological extremeness, increased voter turnout, and stronger partisan identification. The model also makes nuanced predictions about the patterns of ideology in society. These predictions are tested using unique data that measure the overconfidence and standard political characteristics of a nationwide sample of over 3,000 adults. Our numerous predictions find strong support in these data. In particular, we document that overconfidence is a substantively and statistically important predictor of ideological extremeness, voter turnout, and partisan identification.
While the willingness of people to believe unfounded and conspiratorial explanations of events is fascinating and troubling, few have addressed the broader impacts of the dissemination of conspiracy claims. We use survey experiments to assess whether realistic exposure to a conspiracy claim affects conspiracy beliefs and trust in government. These experiments yield interesting and potentially surprising results. We discover that respondents who are asked whether they believe in a conspiracy claim after reading a specific allegation actually report lower beliefs than those not exposed to the specific claim. Turning to trust in government, we find that exposure to a conspiracy claim has a potent negative effect on trust in government services and institutions including those unconnected to the allegations. Moreover, and consistent with our belief experiment, we find that first asking whether people believe in the conspiracy mitigates the negative trust effects. Combining these findings suggests that conspiracy exposure increases conspiracy beliefs and reduces trust, but that asking about beliefs prompts additional thinking about the claims which softens and/or reverses the exposure’s effect on beliefs and trust.
Rumors that President Barack Obama is a Muslim were rampant during the 2008 presidential campaign and continued well into his presidency. These rumors were widely believed, were electorally consequential, and are part of a growing trend of politically motivated misconceptions. Thus, relying principally on the theory of motivated reasoning, we examine the factors that shaped citizens’ beliefs about and responses to messages about Obama's faith. Using an original survey experiment and data from the 2008–2009 American National Election Study panel, we show that citizens’ responses to rumors about Obama's religion were shaped by political predispositions, political awareness, and their interactions. Identification of Obama with Islam was most widespread, and the cues encouraging such identification were most successful, among individuals with low levels of political awareness, conservative and Republican identifications, and negative views of cultural out-groups. Viewing Obama as Muslim was significantly less prevalent among people with high levels of awareness and with the opposite set of predispositions.
Although conspiracy theories have long been a staple of American political culture, no research has systematically examined the nature of their support in the mass public. Using four nationally representative surveys, sampled between 2006 and 2011, we find that half of the American public consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory and that many popular conspiracy theories are differentiated along ideological and anomic dimensions. In contrast with many theoretical speculations, we do not find conspiracism to be a product of greater authoritarianism, ignorance, or political conservatism. Rather, the likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted by a willingness to believe in other unseen, intentional forces and an attraction to Manichean narratives. These findings both demonstrate the widespread allure of conspiracy theories as political explanations and offer new perspectives on the forces that shape mass opinion and American political culture.
Presents an integrative model of the emergence, direction (assimilation vs. contrast), and size of context effects in social judgment.
Identifying causal mechanisms is a fundamental goal of social science. Researchers seek to study not only whether one variable affects another but also how such a causal relationship arises. Yet commonly used statistical methods for identifying causal mechanisms rely upon untestable assumptions and are often inappropriate even under those assumptions. Randomizing treatment and intermediate variables is also insufficient. Despite these difficulties, the study of causal mechanisms is too important to abandon. We make three contributions to improve research on causal mechanisms. First, we present a minimum set of assumptions required under standard designs of experimental and observational studies and develop a general algorithm for estimating causal mediation effects. Second, we provide a method for assessing the sensitivity of conclusions to potential violations of a key assumption. Third, we offer alternative research designs for identifying causal mechanisms under weaker assumptions. The proposed approach is illustrated using media framing experiments and incumbency advantage studies.
This paper examines the stability of the concept of rumor in the past century. It is suggested that not only do models of explanation change, but rumors themselves also change - not only in content, but perhaps in the way they are believed or disbelieved. Social scientific interest in rumors begins with the birth of modern psychology in the 19th century, shifts to social psychology and sociology in mid-20th century, prompted by governmental concern over subversion through rumor during the Second World War, and is finally revived by folklorists in more recent decades. A central assumption emerged that ambiguous situations create a vacuum which rumor fills. By the late 1960s, despite a decline in social scientific interest in the topic, a handful of significant empirical and theoretical challenges emerge from scattered studies. The discipline of folklore begins to take more interest in contemporary rumor in the 1970s, and by the early 1990s the rubric of the rumor is almost entirely supplanted in English language scholarship by the ‘urban legend’. It is argued that particular attention can and should be paid, in contemporary analysis, to the general information environment, the politics of belief, and cultural shifts in ideas about truth and falsity.
Developments are discussed that shaped the conceptualization of the psychology of rumor. In the period just after World War II, G. W. Allport and L. Postman (1947) postulated that the occurrence of rumors will vary according to an incident's thematic importance and the amount of ambiguity inherent in a given situation. Although never empirically validated, that basic proposition until recently was widely accepted. Recent work now suggests that rumor generation and transmission result from an optimal combination of personal anxiety, general uncertainty, credulity, and outcome-relevant involvement. General implications of the proposed conceptualization for rumor control are raised. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Each day, we struggle to distinguish rumor from fact. Did the U.S. government blow up levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina? Did American soldiers use night-vision goggles to spy on Iraqi women in Fallujah during the Iraqi War? These reports, taken from national and international media accounts, turned out to be false. In
Rumor Psychology: Social and Organizational Approaches, expert rumor researchers Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia investigate how rumors start and spread, how their accuracy can be determined, and how rumors can be controlled, particularly given their propagation across media outlets and within organizations. Exactly what is rumor, and how does it differ from gossip? Even though these terms are commonly used interchangeably, they differ greatly in function and content. Whereas gossip serves to evaluate and shape the social network, rumor functions to make sense of an ambiguous situation or to help people adapt to perceived or actual threats. Why do people spread and believe rumors? Rumors attract attention, evoke emotion, incite involvement, and affect attitudes and actions. Rumor transmission is motivated by three broad psychological motivations--fact-finding, relationship enhancement, and self-enhancement--all of which help individuals and groups make sense in the face of uncertainty. Rumor is also closely entwined with a host of social and organizational phenomena, including social cognition, prejudice and stereotyping, interpersonal and intergroup relations, social influence, and organizational trust and communication. This book comes at an interesting time given the sociopolitical Zeitgeist, making the study of rumor accuracy, transmission, and propagation a high priority for the international intelligence community. It will also be of interest to social psychologists, organizational psychologists, and researchers in organizational communication, organizational behavior, human resource administration, and public relations personnel who regularly encounter rumors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The "basic law of rumor" of G. W. Allport and L. J. Postman (1947), which asserts that rumor strength varies with thematic importance and ambiguity, is called into question. As a possible synthesizing proposition, it is instead postulated that rumor results from combinations of uncertainty and anxiety that are related to rumor strength differently as state and trait factors. (100 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
People's enduring psychological tendencies are reflected in their traits. Contemporary research on personality establishes that traits are rooted largely in biology, and that the central aspects of personality can be captured in frameworks, or taxonomies, focused on five trait dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. In this article, we integrate a five-factor view of trait structure within a holistic model of the antecedents of political behavior, one that accounts not only for personality, but also for other factors, including biological and environmental influences. This approach permits attention to the complex processes that likely underlie trait effects, and especially to possible trait–situation interactions. Primary tests of our hypotheses draw on data from a 2006 U.S. survey, with supplemental tests introducing data from Uruguay and Venezuela. Empirical analyses not only provide evidence of the value of research on personality and politics, but also signal some of the hurdles that must be overcome for inquiry in this area to be most fruitful.
Previous research on personality traits and political attitudes has largely focused on the direct relationships between traits and ideological self-placement. There are theoretical reasons, however, to suspect that the relationships between personality traits and political attitudes (1) vary across issue domains and (2) depend on contextual factors that affect the meaning of political stimuli. In this study, we provide an explicit theoretical framework for formulating hypotheses about these differential effects. We then leverage the power of an unusually large national survey of registered voters to examine how the relationships between Big Five personality traits and political attitudes differ across issue domains and social contexts (as defined by racial groups). We confirm some important previous findings regarding personality and political ideology, find clear evidence that Big Five traits affect economic and social attitudes differently, show that the effect of Big Five traits is often as large as that of education or income in predicting ideology, and demonstrate that the relationships between Big Five traits and ideology vary substantially between white and black respondents.
An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or
unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic
format. We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from
a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions
among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually
increase misperceptions among the group in question.
KeywordsMisperceptions-Misinformation-Ignorance-Knowledge-Correction-Backfire
It is proposed that motivation may affect reasoning through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes--that is, strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs. The motivation to be accurate enhances use of those beliefs and strategies that are considered most appropriate, whereas the motivation to arrive at particular conclusions enhances use of those that are considered most likely to yield the desired conclusion. There is considerable evidence that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at, but their ability to do so is constrained by their ability to construct seemingly reasonable justifications for these conclusions. These ideas can account for a wide variety of research concerned with motivated reasoning.
The research examines an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes based on the evaluations that are automatically activated from memory on the presentation of Black versus White faces. Study 1, which concerned the technique's validity, obtained different attitude estimates for Black and White participants and also revealed that the variability among White participants was predictive of other race-related judgments and behavior. Study 2 concerned the lack of correspondence between the unobtrusive estimates and Modern Racism Scale (MRS) scores. The reactivity of the MRS was demonstrated in Study 3. Study 4 observed an interaction between the unobtrusive estimates and an individual difference in motivation to control prejudiced reactions when predicting MRS scores. The theoretical implications of the findings for consideration of automatic and controlled components of racial prejudice are discussed, as is the status of the MRS.
This article explores how much memes like urban legends succeed on the basis of informational selection (i.e., truth or a moral lesson) and emotional selection (i.e., the ability to evoke emotions like anger, fear, or disgust). The article focuses on disgust because its elicitors have been precisely described. In Study 1, with controls for informational factors like truth, people were more willing to pass along stories that elicited stronger disgust. Study 2 randomly sampled legends and created versions that varied in disgust; people preferred to pass along versions that produced the highest level of disgust. Study 3 coded legends for specific story motifs that produce disgust (e.g., ingestion of a contaminated substance) and found that legends that contained more disgust motifs were distributed more widely on urban legend Web sites. The conclusion discusses implications of emotional selection for the social marketplace of ideas.
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. (Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644)) “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction”; “we know where they are.” These statements, made in 2002 and 2003 by the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, and the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, respectively, turned out to have no basis in fact when the post-invasion search for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq failed to turn up any tools of chemical or biological warfare, let alone the massive stockpiles that US officials insisted had been hidden by the Iraqi regime. Notwithstanding, polls conducted in the United States for up to a year after the invasion, by which time the absence of WMDs had become fully evident and made public, continued to reveal a persistent belief in their existence among 20% to 40% of respondents (Kull et al ., 2004; PIPA, 2004). Indeed, for several months after President Bush declared the war to have ended (May 1, 2003), some 20% of respondents additionally believed that Iraq had in fact used chemical or biological weapons on the battlefield during the immediately preceding conflict (Kull et al ., 2004.) Lest one think that these figures merely represent some inertia of opinion, with those erroneous beliefs inexorably fading over time, polls conducted in March, 2006, revealed that nearly a quarter of Americans continued to believe that Iraq possessed WMDs just before the invasion (PIPA, 2006).
Public opinion polls show consistently that a substantial portion of the American public would vote for a qualified female
presidential candidate. Because of the controversial nature of such questions, however, the responses may suffer from social
desirability effects. In other words, respondents may be purposely giving false answers as not to violate societal norms.
Using an unobtrusive measure called the “list experiment,” we find that public opinion polls are indeed exaggerating support
for a female president. Roughly 26 percent of the public is “angry or upset” about the prospect of a female president. Moreover,
this level of dissatisfaction is constant across several demographic groups.
It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it-and its targets have ranged from "the in-ternational bankers" to Masons, J esu-its, and munitions makers. A merican politics has often been an arena for "angry minds: In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exagger-ation, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression "paranoid style" I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with pro-foundly disturbed minds. It is the use of par-anoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent. Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States: How can we account for our present situ-ation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men:' ... What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts con-tributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence .... The laws of probability would dictate that part of ... [the] decisions would serve the coun-try's interest.
If justification were needed for taking notice once again of the liberal-conservative distinction, it would be sufficient, I suppose, merely to observe that this division has been injected into the politics of Western nations for at least two centuries and, depending on the nature of one's criteria, perhaps longer.
The distinction between the two camps has not always been sharply drawn, of course, for both have been compelled, as a condition for survival, to hold important beliefs in common. Moreover, each has reversed itself on certain issues, such as government regulation of the economy, casting off old views in favor of beliefs previously cherished by the other. Competing for popular support in elections, and succeeding one another in office, the two camps have, of necessity, taken on many values in common, tempering their programs and adjusting their courses to the practical requirements of political contest. In a system like ours, where the parties have functioned less as ideological movements than as brokerage organizations hoping to attract majority support from almost every segment of the electorate, the distinction has tended to be dulled even further, until, at the actual scenes of daily political struggle, it has often faded entirely.
The public is prone to overestimate the size of minority group populations. Does providing information about the actual size of populations affect attitudes towards those groups? We investigate innumeracy about immigrant populations. As in previous studies, we find that people tend to overestimate the size of the foreign-born population, and that these estimates are associated with an individual's formal education and with the number of immigrants in the surrounding context. Then, in two different survey experiments, we test whether information about immigrants affects attitudes—either by correcting these overestimates or by priming the annual level of immigration. In both experiments, the information influenced attitudes very little. We conclude by noting the potential limits of "information effects" on mass attitudes.
In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public’s political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.
One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of “challenge interviews” on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and 9/11, we propose instead a social psychological explanation for the belief in this link. We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration's decision to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification: for these voters, the fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11.
We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased-information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.
A questionnaire concerning the degree of belief in 12 statements of current rumors was circulated to adults through children in 8 Syracuse schools. Attitudes toward rationing and wartime administration were also solicited. The 537 complete returns are analyzed to reveal possible factors associated with belief in rumors. Various statistical controls were tried to delimit the combined influence of several factors. The reasoning is presented in detailed research notes. The rumors were believed in one fourth of the cases. Belief was associated with previous hearing of the rumors, antirationing attitudes, suspicion of slackerism, and failure to read the Rumor Clinic column. Relationship to sex, age, or occupation is doubtful. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Although some scholars have argued that authoritarianism is characteristic only of the right and not of the left, persuasive reasons exist for doubting this claim. Intuitive observation of left-wing and right-wing regimes as well as radical political movements of the left and right reveals striking parallels in their styles of political engagement, their reliance upon force, their disdain for democratic ideals and practices and their violations of civil liberties. In addition, systematic inquiry into the similarities and differences between far-left and far-right radicals in the United States has been hampered by various methodological difficulties. One can list, among these, such problems as the obvious inappropriateness of the F scale (owing to its strong right-wing content) as a measure for identifying left-wing authoritarians; the difficulty of obtaining adequate samples of true believers of the extreme left and right; the self-image of the American left as a persecuted minority which, for reasons of self-interest, spuriously inflates the degree of support expressed by its members for individual rights and liberties; and the exposure of both extreme camps to the liberal democratic values dominating American political culture, which unmistakably colours their political rhetoric.
We have reason to think that a similar study conducted in some – perhaps many – European countries would reveal even greater similarities between the far left and far right than we have turned up in the United States. Unlike the United States, which has enjoyed a strong liberal democratic tradition that has served to weaken and soften the intensity of its radical movements, a number of European countries, less wedded to liberal democratic principles, have developed a more vigorous, less diluted tradition of radical politics. These nations have long had to contend with powerful extremist movements actively and significantly engaged in the political struggles of their respective nations. The radical movements of Europe have been more extreme and zealous – more unequivocally revolutionary and reactionary – than the radical movements of the United States. The sustained confrontation of these extremist movements, in our view, is likely to have intensified the authoritarian propensities of each.
In the present article, through a series of surveys in which we have tried to idenify, as best we can, supporters of the far left and far right, we have systematically compared the two camps on a variety of political and psychological characteristics. We find, in keeping with the conventional view, that the far left and the far right stand at opposite end of the familiar left–right continuum on many issues of public policy, political philosophy and personal belief. They hold sharply contrasting views on questions of law and order, foreign policy, social welfare, economic equality, racial equality, women's rights, sexual freedom, patriotism, social conventions, religion, family values and orientations towards business, labour and private enterprise.
Nevertheless, while the two camps embrace different programmatic beliefs, both are deeply estranged from certain features of American society and highly critical of what they perceive as the spiritual and moral degeneration of American institutions. Both view American society as dominated by conspiratorial forces that are working to defeat their respective ideological aims.
The degree of their alienation is intensified by the zealous and unyielding manner in which they hold their beliefs. Both camps possess an inflexible psychological and political style characterized by the tendency to view social and political affairs in crude, unambiguous and stereotypical terms. They see political life as a conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’, a struggle between good and evil played out on a battleground where compromise amounts to capitulation and the goal is total victory.
The far left and the far right also resemble each other in the way they pursue their political goals. Both are disposed to censor their opponents, to deal harshly with enemies, to sacrifice the well-being even of the innocent in order to serve a ‘higher purpose’, and to use cruel tactics if necessary to ‘persuade’ society of the wisdom of their objectives. Both tend to support (or oppose) civil liberties in a highly partisan and self-serving fashion, supporting freedom for themselves and for the groups and causes they favour while seeking to withhold it from enemies and advocates of causes they dislike.
In sum, when the views of the far left and far right are evaluated against the standard left–right ideological dimension, they can appropriately be classifled at opposite ends of the political spectrum. But when the two camps are evaluated on questions of political and psychological style, the treatment of political opponents, and the tactics that they are willing to employ to achieve their ends, the display many parallels that can rightly be labelled authoritarian.
Due to the inherent sensitivity of many survey questions, a number of researchers have adopted an indirect questioning technique
known as the list experiment (or the item-count technique) in order to reduce dishonest or evasive responses. However, standard
practice with the list experiment requires a large sample size, utilizes only a difference-in-means estimator, and does not
provide a measure of the sensitive item for each respondent. This paper addresses all of these issues. First, the paper presents
design principles for the standard list experiment (and the double list experiment) for the reduction of bias and variance
as well as providing sample-size formulas for the planning of studies. Second, this paper proves that a respondent-level probabilistic
measure for the sensitive item can be derived. This provides a basis for diagnostics, improved estimation, and regression
analysis. The techniques in this paper are illustrated with a list experiment from the 2008–2009 American National Election
Studies (ANES) Panel Study and an adaptation of this experiment.
Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event. A recent example is the belief, widespread in some parts of the world, that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out not by Al Qaeda, but by Israel or the United States. Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence, and the existence of such theories raises significant challenges for policy and law. The first challenge is to understand the mechanisms by which conspiracy theories prosper; the second challenge is to understand how such theories might be undermined. Such theories typically spread as a result of identifiable cognitive blunders, operating in conjunction with informational and reputational influences. A distinctive feature of conspiracy theories is their self-sealing quality. Conspiracy theorists are not likely to be persuaded by an attempt to dispel their theories; they may even characterize that very attempt as further proof of the conspiracy. Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology, in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. Various policy dilemmas, such as the question whether it is better for government to rebut conspiracy theories or to ignore them, are explored in this light.
Many political scientists and policymakers argue that unmediated events—the successes and failures on the battlefield—determine whether the mass public will support military excursions. The public supports war, the story goes, if the benefits of action outweigh the costs of conflict. Other scholars contend that the balance of elite discourse influences public support for war. I draw upon survey evidence from World War II and the current war in Iraq to come to a common conclusion regarding public support for international interventions. I find little evidence that citizens make complex cost/benefit calculations when evaluating military action. Instead, I find that patterns of elite conflict shape opinion concerning war. When political elites disagree as to the wisdom of intervention, the public divides as well. But when elites come to a common interpretation of a political reality, the public gives them great latitude to wage war.
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, widespread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.
When time is limited, researchers may be faced with the choice of using an extremely brief measure of the Big-Five personality dimensions or using no measure at all. To meet the need for a very brief measure, 5 and 10-item inventories were developed and evaluated. Although somewhat inferior to standard multi-item instruments, the instruments reached adequate levels in terms of: (a) convergence with widely used Big-Five measures in self, observer, and peer reports, (b) test–retest reliability, (c) patterns of predicted external correlates, and (d) convergence between self and observer ratings. On the basis of these tests, a 10-item measure of the Big-Five dimensions is offered for situations where very short measures are needed, personality is not the primary topic of interest, or researchers can tolerate the somewhat diminished psychometric properties associated with very brief measures.
Participants are not always as diligent in reading and following instructions as experimenters would like them to be. When participants fail to follow instructions, this increases noise and decreases the validity of their data. This paper presents and validates a new tool for detecting participants who are not following instructions – the Instructional manipulation check (IMC). We demonstrate how the inclusion of an IMC can increase statistical power and reliability of a dataset.
From World War II to the war in Iraq, periods of international conflict seem like unique moments in U.S. political historyâbut when it comes to public opinion, they are not. To make this groundbreaking revelation, In Time of War explodes conventional wisdom about American reactions to World War II, as well as the more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adam Berinsky argues that public response to these crises has been shaped less by their defining characteristicsâsuch as what they cost in lives and resourcesâthan by the same political interests and group affiliations that influence our ideas about domestic issues. With the help of World War IIâera survey data that had gone virtually untouched for the past sixty years, Berinsky begins by disproving the myth of âthe good warâ that Americans all fell in line to support after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack, he reveals, did not significantly alter public opinion but merely punctuated interventionist sentiment that had already risen in response to the ways that political leaders at home had framed the fighting abroad. Weaving his findings into the first general theory of the factors that shape American wartime opinion, Berinsky also sheds new light on our reactions to other crises. He shows, for example, that our attitudes toward restricted civil liberties during Vietnam and after 9/11 stemmed from the same kinds of judgments we make during times of peace. With Iraq and Afghanistan now competing for attention with urgent issues within the United States, In Time of War offers a timely reminder of the full extent to which foreign and domestic politics profoundly influenceâand ultimately illuminateâeach other.
This study explored rumor transmission as a function of the anxiety of the group exposed to that rumor. Four eight-member groups which were designated either as high anxiety or low anxiety on the basis of scores on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (MAS) were presented with a rumor through a sociometrically selected individual. Issues relevant to the groups, with basic similarities across all four groups, were selected as the rumors. That these topics were equally important to the individuals involved is testified to by the fact that importance rating on these issues at the conclusion of the study did not differ significantly among the groups. As predicted, the groups that were high anxious when confronted with a rumor of importance transmitted that rumor throughout that group with a higher frequency than did the groups of low anxious members when confronted with an issue of importance. A model of rumor transmission dependent upon anxiety was proposed.
The Enduring Importance of False Political Beliefs" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association
- John Bullock
Bullock, John. 2006. "The Enduring Importance of False Political Beliefs" Paper presented at the
annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Hyatt Regency Albuquerque,
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Partisan Bias in Responses to Factual Questions
- John G Bullock
- Alan Gerber
- Gregory Huber
Bullock, John G., Alan Gerber, and Gregory Huber. 2010. "Partisan Bias in Responses to Factual
Questions." Western Political Science Association 2010 Annual Meeting Paper, San
Francisco, CA.
Reducing Satisficing behavior in Experimental Research
- Adam J Berinsky
- Michele Margolis
- Michael Sances
Berinsky, Adam J., Michele Margolis, and Michael Sances. "Reducing Satisficing behavior in
Experimental Research." Working Paper, MIT.
Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science, and Fake History
- Damian Thompson
Thompson, Damian. 2008. Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine,
Bogus Science, and Fake History. New York: W.W. Norton.
In ed. Rumor Mills: The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend, Gary Alan Fine, Veronique Campion-Vincent, and Chip Heath
- Bill Ellis
Ellis, Bill. 2005. "Legend/AntiLegend: Humor as an Integral Part of the Contemporary Legend
Process." In ed. Rumor Mills: The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend, Gary Alan Fine, Veronique
Campion-Vincent, and Chip Heath. New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction.
Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground
- Jonathan Kay
Kay, Jonathan. 2011. Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground.
New York: HarperCollins.
Assessing the Prevalence of Socially Undesirable Opinions: The Design of the Double List Experiment
- Adam J Berinsky
- Adam N Glynn
Berinsky, Adam J and Adam N. Glynn. 2010. "Assessing the Prevalence of Socially Undesirable
Opinions: The Design of the Double List Experiment." Working Paper.
Assessing Bias in Self-Reported News Exposure
- Markus Prior
Prior, Markus. 2007. "Assessing Bias in Self-Reported News Exposure." Presented at the 57th
Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA), San Francisco, CA.
An End to a Means: Partisanship, Policy Preferences and Global Warming
- Patrick Moynihan
- Langer Gary
- Craighill Peyton
Moynihan, Patrick, Langer Gary, Craighill Peyton. 2010. "An End to a Means: Partisanship, Policy
Preferences and Global Warming." 65th Annual Conference of the American Association
for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), Chicago, IL
Education about flu can reduce intentions to get a vaccination
- I Skurnik
- C Yoon
- N Schwarz
Skurnik, I., Yoon, C., and Schwarz, N. 2007. Education about flu can reduce intentions to get a
vaccination. Working Paper.
This I Believe ABC News Online
- Gary Langer
Langer, Gary. August 30 2010. "This I Believe." ABC News Online.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenumbers/2010/08/this-i-believe.html