Moralization and Extremism Robustly Amplify Myside Sharing

Abstract

Evidence suggests that political polarization in the United States may be due, in part, to liberal and conservative partisans living in different factual realities, as a consequence of being exposed to information streams that rarely challenge their background beliefs and cherished narratives. In this project, we approached the issue of biased access to political information at the level of information emission, by focusing on ordinary citizens’ decisions to share political news headlines on simulated social media touching on four controversial issues: gun control, abortion, sex equality and racial equality. Across 8 studies, we found robust evidence that participants have a sharing preference for politically congruent news items over incongruent ones, and that this sharing bias increases with the moral importance of the issue. Those effects were observed on true and false headlines alike. Perceived accuracy and coalitional motivations to share headlines to advance political goals were among the main motivations to share. The transmission preference for congruent content and its interaction with issue importance held in spite of manipulations of the anonymousness of sharing (from an anonymous vs. a personal social media account), and audience’s political congeniality (agree vs. disagree). Intervention messages reminding participants of their susceptibility to the myside bias had little moderating influence. While biased communication on politics may be rational for the individual, it likely contributes to reinforce partisan differences in perceptions of society, and may reinforce affective polarization.

Intentions vs. efficiency in policy evaluations

“…[protecting the environment] should be the government's priority?" (Marie, Altay, Strickland, 2020). Reponses were collected on a slider scale ranging from 0, "I don't care" to 100, "Absolute priority", with 50 as default slider position.…”

“…Participants then reported their level of moral commitment to environmental protection on a 3-item scale: "Protecting nature is an absolute moral imperative", "The conviction that one must fight to protect the environment is central to my identity" (inspired from Skitka et al 2005;Stahl, Zaal, Skitka, 2016); "Protecting the environment should be the government's priority" (Marie, Altay, Strickland, 2020). Responses were collected on 0-100 slider scales anchored in 0, "Totally disagree", and 100, "Totally agree", with 50, "I don't know" as default position.…”

Moral conviction interacts with metacognitive ability in modulating neural activity during sociopolitical decision-making

“…This heightened moral conviction not only affects individuals' cognition, but also scales up and leads to actions that influence others. For example, moral conviction has been linked to greater chances of sharing politically congruent partisan news, regardless of its veracity (Marie et al, 2023). A study analyzing more than 500,000 tweets demonstrated that messages increase their reach by 20% with each additional moral-emotional word (Brady, et al, 2017).…”

Motivations to affiliate with audiences drive partisan sharing of (mis)information on social media

“…First, the widespread existence of online networks of politically like-minded users, sometimes suspected of furthering belief and affective polarization via "echo chamber" effects (Acemoglu et al, 2021;Garrett, 2009;Guess et al, 2018;Sunstein, Cass, 2001). Second, users' tendency to be highly selective in their sharing of political news by preferring to share stories that promote their political convictions and partisan affiliations, even if such news attacks political opponents or makes fabricated claims (Ekstrom & Lai, 2020;Lazer et al, 2018;Marie et al, 2023;Osmundsen et al, 2020;.…”

“…Others argue that citizens are motivated to believe and share more messages that 'affirm their social identity', i.e., that portray the political ingroup positively, thus reinforcing their personal self-esteem, and derogates their outgroups (Pereira et al, 2018). Similarly, being attitudinally extreme on and moralizing a policy issue (e.g., abortion, gun control) have been found to predict stronger partisan sharing of true and false news (Marie et al, 2023).…”