Breitbart Covered My Psychological Research—Accurately
My bias prepared me for the worst
I’m a novice academic when it comes to media engagement and promoting my research in the press. I’ve had some of my research announced via press release before, but there had been no takers. So imagine my surprise when my phone flashed with a call from an unknown number last week with a request for more information.
Some context: A week before the call, I received notification from the British Psychological Society that they wanted to send out a press release about a series of studies I’d recently conducted on the topic of fake news. I was due to present it at their Annual Conference, and they thought the media might be interested in the work.
In essence, the research found that liberals and conservatives both believe fake news to a greater extent if it corresponds to their political views, and both try to delegitimize stories that don’t.
No surprises there — but where the research gets interesting is that we found that liberals tend to believe ideology-affirming news stories more as their levels of “collective narcissism” rise. This basically suggests that their feelings of moral superiority in the political sphere drive this behavior.
