Tyler Cowen points today to a 2021 study that investigates whether liberals or conservatives are more likely to believe viral misinformation. The researchers removed their own bias by using a third-party service to track the 20 most viral news stories (ten true and ten false) on a biweekly basis. At the same time they surveyed Americans one week after the viral stories to see which ones they believed. The results were dramatically clear: liberals believed fewer of the viral lies (24% to 61%) and more of the viral truths (80% to 70%):
Part of the reason for this difference is simple: true statements were overwhelmingly associated with the left (65% to 10%) while false statements were more associated with the right (46% to 23%):
Liberals had an easier time accepting true statements because true statements generally benefit their side. Conversely, conservatives are more susceptible to lies because lies generally benefit their side. But there's more: liberals were considerably more likely to accept even inconvenient statements than conservatives. Conservatives had a much stronger tendency to judge truth and falsehood simply by how much a statement benefited or harmed them.
Here is the authors' conclusion:
This study provides the most rigorous evidence to date that U.S. conservatives are uniquely susceptible to political misperceptions in the current sociopolitical environment. Data were collected over 6 months in 2019 and reflect Americans’ beliefs about hundreds of political topics. The topics were selected on the basis of social media engagement, suggesting that these are the very issues that Americans were most likely to encounter online. Analyses suggest that conservatism is associated with a lesser ability to distinguish between true and false claims across a wide range of political issues and with a tendency to believe that all claims are true.
The results are consistent across the board: conservatives are simply less connected to reality than liberals. And keep in mind that this study was conducted in 2019, before Stop the Steal and COVID had turned conservative brains entirely into tapioca.
We have got to stop calling people who don't believe in facts "conservative", it's become super-Orwellized so gradually nobody noticed.
This. They are not "conservatives," they are right-wing extremists. The Democratic Party is the party of conservatives. There is no significant left/liberal party in the US.
Well said.
1+
Just another example of how right wingers are fundamentally terrible people.
Tapioca lol
Colbert was right! (And comedians have a way of seeing to the heart of issues.)
Now that "science" has confirmed what us libz have long believed, what can we do? The "other side" only wants to hear stuff that's
* favorable to what they want to hear
* paints them as victims
* insists we are "disrespecting" them if not outright laughing at them
* Paints us as deluded "sheeple" and other acts of extreme projection
* demonizes various "minority" groups, the favorite being Jews (of course), black folks, hispanics, and immigrants in general
* glorifies that big con man who is continuing to do damage to the very fabric of the United States
Et cetera. How can people with such belief systems be communicated with? They are our fellow Americans. We owe them as much as if they were folks who decided it was time to switch sexes.
Well, I for one don't respect them and I do laugh in their face when they post here. Why not? Nothing I can do or say will change their minds in the slightest, and indeed, I point this out to them as part and parcel with their serial dishonesties.
Less ability to distinguish true from false or less willingness?
And once again, Kevin writes ridiculous things:
"And keep in mind that this study was conducted in 2019, before Stop the Steal and COVID had turned conservative brains entirely into tapioca."
Right wing Republican brains had turned entirely to tapioca long, bigly long, before 2019. (Just for a few examples, Newt Gingrich and company? Vince Foster? The Tea Party? The DC Clinton pizza basement pedophile ring run from a basement-less DC pizza parlor? QAnon? Ring any bells?) Which is why they believed Drumpf and anti-vaxxers in the first place.
QAnon didn't start until the end of 2017, and wasn't really visible at Trump rallies until mid-2018, so Kevin isn't that far off. Most conservatives didn't believe in the Comet Ping Pong Pizza thing. Trump really was a rallying point for a lot of this, and that amped up massively with COVID.
But I was told to engage, converse, include, and tolerate these people. Was I told to seal a suicide pact?
I get it, they're assholes, but they're our assholes. There's only so far I can go...
They have to make part of the trip too.
U.S. conservatives are uniquely susceptible to political misperceptions ...
Can't disagree with the data, but I think the conclusion reveals an (entirely understandable) bias on the part of the authors, ie that conformance to observations -- to "facts" -- is the definition of "truth" or at least the highest version of it. But I don't think modern "conservatives" would agree; I think for them the highest "truth" is a belief or an ideal agreed upon by their "in-group." Eg, for them, that Trump "actually" (or if things weren't "unfair," should have) won the 2020 election is the truth. That the COVID pandemic was a grotesque and un-American infringement on their economic freedom and bodily autonomy by meddling big-gummint bureaucrats using numbers they cooked up out of maybe a bad flu season plus bribing hospitals to alter their reports is the truth. And these things are "true" because they and their friends believe them and their media repeat and recycle them.
Yes they may be more gullible on average, but there's something worse at work too. It's a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment concepts of observations and logic leading to conclusions (which therefore necessarily depend on observations) rather than beliefs instructed by dogma guiding interpretation (which therefore depends on beliefs and dogma).
So you're saying they're snowflakes.
Well on the one hand they're more easily offended, but on the other they can be ferocious, in both cases because their self-image is tied closely to their specific beliefs. So maybe ... vicious snowflakes?
BINGO
You got it in one. To poke these wights in the eye with a sharp stick in not -- repeat, not -- overreacting.
Was this cross-correlated with some sort of objective assessment of intelligence? Maybe SAT, ACT or Stanford-Binet scores for the interview subjects? At least some of them?
The truth is that the "Base" is truth-challenged because it has no collected collegium of actual information to which it can compare new information for general congruence with settled fact.
All these are fancy words for "Modern Republicans are ill-educated, and verge on stupidity."
Conservatives, particularly rural conservatives, are less likely to have pursued higher education where critical thinking skills would be developed.
In other words, there’s a reason Trump loves the uneducated.
I disagree with the idea that conservatives have recently gotten worse. I believe that they have always believed in being selfish, in holding an advantage over other people, and in sticking with the group thought regardless of it having any objective truth. The truth is, that in many cases, this kind of thinking gives them an advantage in life.
Some people are born that way, but others are not.
If anything has changed, it is the world in which we all live. It is becoming smaller, and in the fight between dividing up a pie of a fixed size, and growing that pie, the advantage goes to the people who don't believe that life is a zero-sum game. They get their share, not by taking it from others, but by making a bigger pie. These are people who tend to view every person as an asset in the struggle to make the world a better place, rather than as someone looking to steal their lunch.
One of the unfortunate aspects of being mean and selfish is that it is easy. You don't have to think too much to follow that philosophy, so it attracts people who don't like to think for themselves.
Finding a way to collaborate for the betterment of everyone is much, much harder.
Are U.S. conservatives uniquely susceptible? Because I would bet that the same pattern holds true in many countries these days.
If you read the supporting information, where the actual questions are, you’d find they are weirdly specific. They are now around eight years old, and even a news-hound such as myself would answer “I don’t know” to most of them. If you asked me similar stuff about last month’s news, I’d still give that answer at least a third of the time.
This again is the result of the 50+ year strategy of Republicans to arouse White Christian tribal instincts. Objectivity is lost when this arousal is great enough. Anything the other side does is wrong and anything your side does is right.
The left is also susceptible to these instincts, but arousing them is not a major and necessary part of Democratic strategy. Democrats could do better if they could arouse some kind of class tribal instincts, but this has been less successful and is not lucrative for politicians.
@bbleh said it well: “It's a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment concepts of observations and logic leading to conclusions (which therefore necessarily depend on observations)”.
It’s not the whole answer, but we used to have a shared set of facts about political developments, for most people gained from the MSM nightly news.
Fox broke that, giving people who wanted to hear it a different narrative that some found conveniently in tune with biases that had previously been socially unacceptable.
For all their faults, the network news anchors actually did anchor basic facts that marked you as at least somewhat nutty if you disputed them. But without that sense of common truths, any weird theory became fair game.
Relying on faith rather than evidence is not new; it's as old as humanity.
"Part of the reason for this difference is simple: true statements were overwhelmingly associated with the left while false statements were more associated with the right."
The obvious lesson is that people on my side need to lie more.
That 61% correlates almost exactly with the amount that Fox News lies to its viewers. Coincidence?