Political Orientation Predicts Credulity Regarding Putative Hazards

Abstract

23 24 25 26 The instruments described in this paper are included in the Supplementary Online Materials, and 27 are also archived at osf.io/qqq82. The complete datasets, lists of variables, and analytic code are 28 archived at osf.io/qqq82 and http://escholarship.org/uc/item/82j5p9r3 29 Accepted for publication in Psychological Science 1 Abstract 30To benefit from information provided by others, people must be somewhat credulous. However, 31 credulity entails risks. The optimal level of credulity depends on the relative costs of believing 32 misinformation versus failing to attend to accurate information. When information concerns 33 hazards, erroneous incredulity is often more costly than erroneous credulity, as disregarding 34 accurate warnings is more harmful than adopting unnecessary precautions. Because no 35 equivalent asymmetry characterizes information concerning benefits, people should generally be 36 more credulous of hazard information than of benefit information. This adaptive negatively-37 biased credulity is linked to negativity bias in general, and is more prominent among those who 38 believe the world to be dangerous. Because both threat sensitivity and dangerous-world beliefs 39 differ between conservatives and liberals, we predicted that conservatism would positively 40 correlate with negatively-biased credulity. Two online studies of Americans support this 41 prediction, potentially illuminating the impact of politicians' alarmist claims on different 42 portions of the electorate. 43 44 Keywords: threat sensitivity; negativity bias; negatively-biased credulity; political orientation 45 2 In 2012, a liberal professor wrote that the Obama Administration was stockpiling 46 ammunition, preparing for totalitarian rule. This idea was ignored by liberals. In 2015, 47 conservative bloggers asserted that a military exercise aimed to occupy Texas and impose 48 martial law. Conservatives became so concerned that the Texas Governor ordered the State 49Guard to monitor the exercise. 50The different fates of these two conspiracy theories might simply reflect their historical 51 particulars. Whereas in 2012 liberal Americans largely approved of the Obama Administration, 52 in 2015 most conservative Americans did not. Perhaps the first theory died while the second 53 prospered simply because the latter resonated with the views of a substantial audience while the 54 former did not. However, two bodies of research suggest that psychological differences related 55 to political orientation may also have been at work. First, a sizeable literature documents that, in 56 the U.S., responsiveness to negative stimuli correlates with political orientation, with 57 conservatives displaying more responsiveness, and liberals displaying less. Second, recent 58 studies indicate that people are more credulous of information concerning hazards than of 59 information concerning benefits -and individuals differ in this regard. Here, we combine these 60 approaches, testing the hypothesis that political orientation is corre...

Political Attitudes and the Processing of Misinformation Corrections

“…This supports the view that conservative minds are particularly prone to worldview effects when processing contentious information (Jost, ; Jost et al, ; Nam et al, ; Prasad et al, ). This might best be explained by the notion that worldview effects are mediated by the negative emotional impact of self‐concept threatening corrections, combined with the assumption that conservatives are (1) particularly susceptible to such threats (Carraro et al, ; Fessler et al, ; Hibbing et al, ; Trevors et al, ) and (2) generally less likely to engage with worldview‐dissonant information based on their greater need for certainty, ambiguity intolerance, and closed‐mindedness (Carney et al, ; Fibert & Ressler, ; Jost, ; Price et al, ).…”

“…An alternative position has highlighted individual differences in personality traits between left‐leaning progressives and right‐leaning conservatives and has claimed that these differences underlie biases in information processing (Feather, ; Jost, ; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, ; Mooney, ; Thórisdóttir & Jost, ). There is ample evidence that conservatives exhibit greater levels of negativity bias and perceived threat (e.g., Carraro, Castelli, & Macchiella, ; Fessler, Pisor, & Holbrook, ; Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, ) as well as greater need for certainty and ambiguity intolerance (e.g., Fibert & Ressler, ; Jost, ) and lower open‐mindedness (e.g., Carney, Jost, Gosling, & Potter, ; Price, Ottati, Wilson, & Kim, ). Jost and colleagues (Jost, ; Jost et al, ) argue that attitudes and beliefs are not, as suggested by the cultural cognition thesis, passively absorbed from one’s sociocultural context, but that an individual tends to actively adopt attitudes that resonate with their personality.…”

Moral Foundations in the 2015-16 U.S. Presidential Primary Debates: The Positive and Negative Moral Vocabulary of Partisan Elites

“…Consistent with CMSC, experimental evidence indicates that "negative information [in the form of unpleasant words or pictures] exerts a stronger automatic attention-grabbing power in the case of political conservatives, as compared to liberals" (Carraro et al 2011, p. 5). Fessler et al (2017) found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to rate false statements about potential hazards as credible in comparison to false statements about potential benefits. Other research shows conservatives to be more sensitive to disgust than liberals, a difference that translates into more severe moral judgments among conservatives on a range of sociocultural issues (Inbar et al 2009;Inbar et al 2012;Eskine et al 2011;Smith et al 2011).…”

Believing Chicken Little: Evolutionary Perspectives on Credulity and Danger

“…Given the functional associations between i) perceptions of the world as dangerous and the value of enhanced negatively-biased credulity, and ii) social conservatism and perceptions of the world as dangerous, it follows that social conservatives should exhibit greater negatively-biased credulity than social liberals. Fessler, Pisor, and Holbrook (2017) tested this prediction by employing the paired-statements measure of negativelybiased credulity described earlier in conjunction with a variety of existing measures of political orientation. In two studies of Americans, the authors found that, per predictions, social conservatism was positively correlated with negatively-biased credulity.…”

“…As a consequence, we can expect natural selection to have shaped the human mind so as to make people more credulous of information concerning hazards than of information concerning benefits, i.e., to exhibit negatively-biased credulity (Fessler et al, 2014;Fessler, Pisor, & Holbrook, 2017).…”