We experimentally investigate the informational theory of legislative
committees (Gilligan and Krehbiel 1989). Two committee members provide policy-relevant
information to a legislature under alternative legislative rules.
Under the open rule, the legislature is free to make any decision;
under the closed rule, the legislature chooses between a member’s
proposal and a status quo. We find that even in the
presence of biases, the committee members improve the legislature’s
decision by providing useful information. We obtain evidence for two
additional predictions: the outlier principle,
according to which more extreme biases reduce the extent of
information transmission; and the distributional
principle, according to which the open rule is more
distributionally efficient than the closed rule. When biases are
less extreme, we find that the distributional principle dominates
the restrictive-rule principle, according to
which the closed rule is more informationally efficient. Overall,
our findings provide experimental support for Gilligan and
Krehbiel’s informational theory.
Since Wakefield et al. (1998), the public was exposed to mixed information surrounding the claim that measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism. A persistent trend to delay the vaccination during 1998-2011 in the US was driven by children of college-educated mothers, suggesting that these mothers held biases against the vaccine influenced by the early unfounded claim. Consistent with confirmatory bias, exposures to negative information about the vaccine strengthened their biases more than exposures to positive information attenuated them. Positive online information, however, had strong impacts on vaccination decisions, suggesting that online dissemination of vaccine-safety information may help tackle the sticky misinformation.
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