Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions

Abstract

The idea that U.S. conservatives are uniquely likely to hold misperceptions is widespread but has not been systematically assessed. Research has focused on beliefs about narrow sets of claims never intended to capture the richness of the political information environment. Furthermore, factors contributing to this performance gap remain unclear. We generated an unique longitudinal dataset combining social media engagement data and a 12-wave panel study of Americans’ political knowledge about high-profile news over 6 months. Results confirm that conservatives have lower sensitivity than liberals, performing worse at distinguishing truths and falsehoods. This is partially explained by the fact that the most widely shared falsehoods tend to promote conservative positions, while corresponding truths typically favor liberals. The problem is exacerbated by liberals’ tendency to experience bigger improvements in sensitivity than conservatives as the proportion of partisan news increases. These results underscore the importance of reducing the supply of right-leaning misinformation.

The role of political devotion in sharing partisan misinformation and resistance to fact-checking

“…In fact, a reanalysis of shows that the employed accuracy nudge had little to no effect among conservatives compared to liberals (Rathje, S., Roozenbeek, J., Traberg, C., Van Bavel, J.J., van der Linden, in press). This asymmetry is in line with other studies showing that conservatives and those at the far-right of the political spectrum are less sensitive to false claims on social media (Garrett & Bond, 2021), are more exposed to them (Grinberg et al, 2019) and six to seven times more likely to share them than moderates and liberals (Grinberg et al, 2019;Guess et al, 2019). However, because conservatives and liberals perform equally well on the CRT (Kahan, 2012), lack of analytical reasoning cannot explain the differences in misinformation sharing and susceptibility to factchecks across the political spectrum.…”

“…The present work is subject to several limitations. Because of previously reported political asymmetries in information sharing (Garrett & Bond, 2021;Grinberg et al, 2019;Guess et al, 2019), we decided to focus on conservatives. However, our data indicate that extreme political options elicit higher levels of identity fusion among supporters, suggesting that far-left supporters could possibly show similar patterns of misinformation sharing relative to sacred values.…”

“…Because conservatives and far-right supporters disproportionally share far more misinformation (Garrett & Bond, 2021;Grinberg et al, 2019;Guess et al, 2019), we conducted two preregistered experiments with these populations in the US and Spain (N = 1,609). Moreover, to better understand the neurocognitive processes underlying misinformation sharing, we conducted a neuroimaging study with far-right supporters in Spain (N = 36).…”

Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency

“…Peterson “found a way to monetize SJWs [Social Justice Warriors]” (Rogan, 2017 ) by arguing (incorrectly) that the bill would result in the arrest and imprisonment of faculty who refused to use transgendered students' correct pronouns. Peterson's dire predictions about the bill never coming to pass did not result in his followers deserting him, which is consistent with the work of Garrett and Bond ( 2021 ). In a longitudinal study of viral news stories, the authors demonstrated that US conservatives are more susceptible to political misconceptions, particularly when they benefit the in-group.…”

Hierarchy-Enhancing Misinformation: Social Dominance Motives Are Uniquely Associated With Republicans’ Belief In and Sharing of Election-Related Misinformation

“…Nonetheless, much of this work focuses on genericized political misinformation, for example a headline falsely claiming Hillary Clinton was intoxicated the night of the 2016 US election (though note work on reducing climate change denialism, e.g., . As such, work on domain-general mechanisms of misinformation belief may not generalize well to specific misinformation contexts, such as election-related misinformation or misinformation explicitly endorsed by conservative elites, which may better activate ideological mechanisms of belief including conservatives' lower sensitivity to falsehoods (Garrett & Bond, 2021), greater preference for homogenous social networks and conformity (Jost et al, 2018), or authoritarian motives in support for Donald Trump (Choma & Hanoch, 2017;Womick et al, 2019).…”