Right Wingers are more susceptible to believing falsehoods.

[Joe Capitalist]

Conservatives more susceptible to believing falsehoods
Study finds news environment hurts ability to find truth

Conservatives are less able to distinguish political truths from falsehoods than liberals, mainly because of a glut of right-leaning misinformation, a new national study conducted over six months shows.

One of the main drivers of the findings appeared to be the American media and information environment.

“The deck is stacked against conservatives because there is so much more misinformation that supports conservative positions. As a result, conservatives are more often led astray.”

Every two weeks, the researchers identified viral political news stories, 10 true and 10 false, that received high social media engagement.

The researchers then asked participants to assess a series of 20 statements that were based on these stories. Participants labeled each one as true or false and indicated how confident they were in their label.

In the end, participants had evaluated as many as 240 statements on a broad range of topics and representing many different viewpoints.

A separate group of people, recruited online, were surveyed to determine whether the claims, if true, would be better for liberals or for conservatives, or if they were neutral.

For example, participants rated this true statement that received widespread social media engagement when it came out: “Investigators for the DHS Office of the Inspector General have identified poor conditions in several Texas migrant facilities, including extreme overcrowding and serious health risks.”

Results showed that 54% of Democrats correctly said that the statement was “definitely true” – compared to only 18% of Republicans.

Another statement – a false one – was “While serving as Sec. of State, Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia, selling 20% of the U.S. uranium supply to that country in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.”

Here, only 2% of Democrats said this was “definitely true,” but 41% of Republicans did.

“These are important factual claims, yet we see vast partisan differences in belief,” Garrett said.

One of the major issues identified in the study was that these widely shared truths and falsehoods have different implications for liberals and conservatives.

Two-thirds (65%) of the high-engagement true statements were characterized as benefiting liberals, while only 10% of accurate claims were considered beneficial to conservatives. On the other side, 46% of falsehoods were rated as advantageous to conservatives, compared to 23% of false claims benefiting liberals.

“We saw that viral political falsehoods tended to benefit conservatives, while truths tended to favor liberals. That makes it a lot harder for conservatives to avoid misperceptions,” Garrett said.

Although the information environment was the primary reason conservatives were susceptible to misinformation, it may not be the only one.

Results showed that even when the information environment was taken into account, conservatives were slightly more likely to hold misperceptions than were liberals.

“It is difficult to say why that is,” Garrett said. “We can’t explain the finding with our data alone.”

Results did show further distinctions between how conservatives and liberals approached the political claims in the viral stories they evaluated.

Liberals showed greater overall sensitivity, which characterizes an individual’s ability to distinguish truths and falsehoods. Conservatives and liberals were equally good at detecting truths and falsehoods when most true stories were labeled politically neutral.

But if more of the factually accurate stories were labeled political – benefiting either liberal or conservative positions – liberals became better than conservatives at distinguishing true from false statements.

“Conservatives did not get any worse, but they did not keep up with liberals who were getting better at discerning truths and falsehoods,” Garrett said.

Conservatives also showed a stronger “truth bias,” meaning that they were more likely to say that all the claims they were asked about were true.

“That’s a problem because some of the claims were outlandish – there should have been no ambiguity about whether they were true or not,” he said.

Garrett said a strength of this study, compared to many previous ones, is that it analyzed a wide range of political claims, reflecting the diversity of the media environment that Americans are exposed to. It clearly confirms the point made by many media commentators that conservatives are awash in false statements that support what they want to believe.

“We show that the media environment is shaping people’s ability to do this very basic, fundamental task. Democracy depends on people being able to tell the difference between what is true and false and it falters when people have difficulty agreeing on what’s real,” he said.

[T. A. Gardner]

What study? You gave no source where someone could examine it.

[LV426]

What study? You gave no source where someone could examine it.

Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/23/eabf1234

You could have literally just copied and pasted any sentence from the OP into Google to do a search.

It took me 10 seconds to find this study.

[T. A. Gardner]

Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/23/eabf1234

You could have literally just copied and pasted any sentence from the OP into Google to do a search.

It took me 10 seconds to find this study.

The original poster should have linked it. I shouldn't have to do his homework. Aside from that, even if I did as you suggest I might find the wrong paper and would still not be sure it was the one the OP cited in any case. It should have been linked.

[LV426]

The original poster should have linked it. I shouldn't have to do his homework. Aside from that, even if I did as you suggest I might find the wrong paper and would still not be sure it was the one the OP cited in any case. It should have been linked.

Fair enough.

[AProudLefty]

I don't need any study to know that. We have JPP posters to prove that everyday.

[reagansghost]

MAGA's are a cult, and cult members are always susceptible to believing falsehoods

Those pilgrims in Jonestown believed they were getting a ticket to heaven after drinking the koolaid

Those idiots with the sneakers laying dead in their bunkbeds believed they were on their way to a comet

Koresh's victims got burned up alive believing they were serving a new incarnation of some kind of christ figure

MAGA' are cut from the same cloth

[Joe Capitalist]

MAGA's are a cult, and cult members are always susceptible to believing falsehoods

Those pilgrims in Jonestown believed they were getting a ticket to heaven after drinking the koolaid

Those idiots with the sneakers laying dead in their bunkbeds believed they were on their way to a comet

Koresh's victims got burned up alive believing they were serving a new incarnation of some kind of christ figure

MAGA' are cut from the same cloth

You forgot to mention the thousands of TrumpTards who stormed the Capitol on Jan 6th.

[T. A. Gardner]

Okay, I read the ten page report and looked at the study's methodology and questionnaire. Unless you want to say the Liberals would do better than Conservatives on the categories of current events and politics in a game of Jeopardy it's meaningless.

Each participant was given a sting of statements from a long list. These were either supposed to be either false or true. The participant would then have to decide what they thought about that statement without further evidence of any sort saying it was one of four options:

Definitely true
Probably true
Probably false
Definitely false

Each statement was coded Democrat (D), Republican (R), or Neutral (N). This slant was determined using something called Amazon Mechanical Turk. It is a crowdsourcing site.

Many of the statements would require knowledge of specific events, persons, companies, etc., to have any knowledge about them. Someone with better current event / political awareness would do much better on this test than someone who doesn't have that awareness, thus the comparison to it being like Jeopardy.
If, for example, Democrats and Progressives were more attuned to current events and say watched more news than Republicans and Conservatives, they'd do better on the test. They'd be able to answer with correct specificity that a statement was definitely true or false versus probably.

As I read through the questions, I found many were my first thought was I have no idea... For example:

For the first time in company history, Huggies is featuring a black father and daughter on its diaper product packaging.

Not a clue.

There were others with clear, likely unintentional, bias built in like this one:

In a racist rant caught on video, a white woman can be seen telling a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican woman that she should "be deported" and go back to "her own country."

The word racist adds bias. The person reading this should make that decision for themselves based on the rest of the statement. The second problem is in the video how was it determined the woman being berated spoke Spanish and was from Puerto Rico? Those are things that would require this woman to say or show because those are qualities one can't otherwise know about someone.

The sample (see table S1 in the study) shows that persons self-identifying a favoring Democrats out number those favoring Republicans about 3 to 2. The respondents were also overwhelmingly White (858 to 346). 57% were female. The breakdown of that by political position isn't given.

Anyway, I'd say on the whole the study really doesn't prove much of anything other than that people that lean Progressive and Democrat are better at a game of current events and politics Jeopardy than Conservatives and Republicans.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/cont...abf1234_SM.pdf

[Hawkeye10]

Just about everything that the Regressives claim is either a lie or is fantasy born of ignorance,....all too often powered by the desire to be ignorant....a lack of willingness to do the work required to not be ignorant.

[Joe Capitalist]

Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/23/eabf1234

You could have literally just copied and pasted any sentence from the OP into Google to do a search.

It took me 10 seconds to find this study.

Thanks LV. Interesting story, huh.

[AProudLefty]

The woman was upset that the Puerto Rican spoke Spanish.

Why?

[T. A. Gardner]

I don't think it's so much a lie as it is believing a poorly constructed study on the face of it. It requires believing a logical fallacy,



To claim such a study is valid and proof of the proposition put forward in the OP requires looking at and understanding the study. Those that made it can be wrong.

[ExpressLane]

Conservatives more susceptible to believing falsehoods
Study finds news environment hurts ability to find truth

Conservatives are less able to distinguish political truths from falsehoods than liberals, mainly because of a glut of right-leaning misinformation, a new national study conducted over six months shows.

One of the main drivers of the findings appeared to be the American media and information environment.

“The deck is stacked against conservatives because there is so much more misinformation that supports conservative positions. As a result, conservatives are more often led astray.”

Every two weeks, the researchers identified viral political news stories, 10 true and 10 false, that received high social media engagement.

The researchers then asked participants to assess a series of 20 statements that were based on these stories. Participants labeled each one as true or false and indicated how confident they were in their label.

In the end, participants had evaluated as many as 240 statements on a broad range of topics and representing many different viewpoints.

A separate group of people, recruited online, were surveyed to determine whether the claims, if true, would be better for liberals or for conservatives, or if they were neutral.

For example, participants rated this true statement that received widespread social media engagement when it came out: “Investigators for the DHS Office of the Inspector General have identified poor conditions in several Texas migrant facilities, including extreme overcrowding and serious health risks.”

Results showed that 54% of Democrats correctly said that the statement was “definitely true” – compared to only 18% of Republicans.

Another statement – a false one – was “While serving as Sec. of State, Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia, selling 20% of the U.S. uranium supply to that country in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.”

Here, only 2% of Democrats said this was “definitely true,” but 41% of Republicans did.

“These are important factual claims, yet we see vast partisan differences in belief,” Garrett said.

One of the major issues identified in the study was that these widely shared truths and falsehoods have different implications for liberals and conservatives.

Two-thirds (65%) of the high-engagement true statements were characterized as benefiting liberals, while only 10% of accurate claims were considered beneficial to conservatives. On the other side, 46% of falsehoods were rated as advantageous to conservatives, compared to 23% of false claims benefiting liberals.

“We saw that viral political falsehoods tended to benefit conservatives, while truths tended to favor liberals. That makes it a lot harder for conservatives to avoid misperceptions,” Garrett said.

Although the information environment was the primary reason conservatives were susceptible to misinformation, it may not be the only one.

Results showed that even when the information environment was taken into account, conservatives were slightly more likely to hold misperceptions than were liberals.

“It is difficult to say why that is,” Garrett said. “We can’t explain the finding with our data alone.”

Results did show further distinctions between how conservatives and liberals approached the political claims in the viral stories they evaluated.

Liberals showed greater overall sensitivity, which characterizes an individual’s ability to distinguish truths and falsehoods. Conservatives and liberals were equally good at detecting truths and falsehoods when most true stories were labeled politically neutral.

But if more of the factually accurate stories were labeled political – benefiting either liberal or conservative positions – liberals became better than conservatives at distinguishing true from false statements.

“Conservatives did not get any worse, but they did not keep up with liberals who were getting better at discerning truths and falsehoods,” Garrett said.

Conservatives also showed a stronger “truth bias,” meaning that they were more likely to say that all the claims they were asked about were true.

“That’s a problem because some of the claims were outlandish – there should have been no ambiguity about whether they were true or not,” he said.

Garrett said a strength of this study, compared to many previous ones, is that it analyzed a wide range of political claims, reflecting the diversity of the media environment that Americans are exposed to. It clearly confirms the point made by many media commentators that conservatives are awash in false statements that support what they want to believe.

“We show that the media environment is shaping people’s ability to do this very basic, fundamental task. Democracy depends on people being able to tell the difference between what is true and false and it falters when people have difficulty agreeing on what’s real,” he said.

And you actually believe that. Talk about being more subjectable.????

[AProudLefty]

Okay, I read the ten page report and looked at the study's methodology and questionnaire. Unless you want to say the Liberals would do better than Conservatives on the categories of current events and politics in a game of Jeopardy it's meaningless.

Each participant was given a sting of statements from a long list. These were either supposed to be either false or true. The participant would then have to decide what they thought about that statement without further evidence of any sort saying it was one of four options:

Definitely true
Probably true
Probably false
Definitely false

Each statement was coded Democrat (D), Republican (R), or Neutral (N). This slant was determined using something called Amazon Mechanical Turk. It is a crowdsourcing site.

Many of the statements would require knowledge of specific events, persons, companies, etc., to have any knowledge about them. Someone with better current event / political awareness would do much better on this test than someone who doesn't have that awareness, thus the comparison to it being like Jeopardy.
If, for example, Democrats and Progressives were more attuned to current events and say watched more news than Republicans and Conservatives, they'd do better on the test. They'd be able to answer with correct specificity that a statement was definitely true or false versus probably.

As I read through the questions, I found many were my first thought was I have no idea... For example:

For the first time in company history, Huggies is featuring a black father and daughter on its diaper product packaging.

Not a clue.

There were others with clear, likely unintentional, bias built in like this one:

In a racist rant caught on video, a white woman can be seen telling a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican woman that she should "be deported" and go back to "her own country."

The word racist adds bias. The person reading this should make that decision for themselves based on the rest of the statement. The second problem is in the video how was it determined the woman being berated spoke Spanish and was from Puerto Rico? Those are things that would require this woman to say or show because those are qualities one can't otherwise know about someone.

The sample (see table S1 in the study) shows that persons self-identifying a favoring Democrats out number those favoring Republicans about 3 to 2. The respondents were also overwhelmingly White (858 to 346). 57% were female. The breakdown of that by political position isn't given.

Anyway, I'd say on the whole the study really doesn't prove much of anything other than that people that lean Progressive and Democrat are better at a game of current events and politics Jeopardy than Conservatives and Republicans.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/cont...abf1234_SM.pdf

Why was she upset that the Puerto Rican spoke Spanish? And she never told her to go back to Puerto Rico.