No, Liberals and Conservatives Aren’t Both Susceptible to Fake News
I’ve seen a few people share this psychology preprint by Craig Harper and Thom Baguley which purportedly shows that liberals and conservatives are equally likely to believe fake news. Part of it was summarized in Scientific American by Scott Barry Kaufman.
The preprint doesn’t show what purports to show, namely, that liberals and conservatives are both susceptible to fake news.
To begin, the term “Fake News” is a useful descriptive label for the fictitious stories created for profit that circulate in social media. One such unfortunate example is here:
But Fake News is not a useful term for anything constructed for a psychological laboratory story. Those stories may not have any connection with facts, but they are not part of the Fake News ecosystem. They may have cues that suggest they’re false or true, but they’re simply experimenter vignettes that don’t resemble the stories created by Fake News creators.
This doesn’t mean that such vignettes are useless. On the contrary, experimental psychologists could show that people believe a story that confirms their beliefs despite many cues in the story suggesting that’s it’s fictitious. This would involve some advance work on what sorts of cues generally work, because one would want to show that in some particular case the cues fail. Such findings would indicate confirmation bias or, perhaps, gullibility.
Now to track whether liberals and conservatives are equally susceptible to Fake News, we can look at fake news creators, and review political psychology studies that track actual Fake News as it spreads through Facebook and Twitter
When it comes to fake news creators, we have this statement by Justin Coler, CEO of Disinfomedia, owner of numerous fake news sites: Disinfopedia writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but liberals just never take the bait.
We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned
When it comes to political science research, there are studies by Andrew Guess and colleagues showing that Trump supporters shared more fake news than Hillary supporters in 2016. Much more.
About 6 in 10 visits to fake news sites came from the 10% of Americans with the most conservative information diets. See this story in the post about Andy’s work:
Washington Post: Who Was Most Likely to Share Fake News During 2016?
Here’s the average number of links shared from fake news domains, with self-reported ideological affiliation on the X axis.
There’s also research by psychologist Gordon Pennycook showing that Republicans and Democrats both accept news that aligns with their ideology, but Republicans are “far more likely to reject legitimate news that goes against their beliefs.” Here’s a slide from his presentation at SPSP 2019. The graph on the left is Political Congruent and the graph on the right is Politically Incongruent.
The quotation above is from Jay Van Bavel’s summary. Here’s the Powerpoint file. Gordon’s work also shows that highly reflective Democrats are very good at discerning the truthfulness of incongruent news; highly reflective Republicans are very bad at doing so.
However, the lack of a sampling of actual fake news from the Fake News system is not the biggest problem with the study by Craig Harper and Thom Baguley. Rather the biggest problem is the authors constructed what are purportedly symmetrical stories about Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
Here’s a screenshot from the paper. All of these stories, per the authors, are Fake News so believing them indicates partisan bias.
The ideal participant would recognize that all of these stories are fake because they’re factually inaccurate — they were invented by the authors. However, as informed readers know, Obama and Trump are not equal and opposite partisans. If liberals believe that Obama donated a large amount to charity and that Trump is facing criminal charges, that’s because those people are in touch with past facts about Obama and Trump, and people engage in Bayesian reasoning.
Obama has a history of integrity and honesty. Zero people in Obama’s administration received felony convictions. In fact, zero had felony indictments. Compare that with 16 felony indictments for George W. Bush, 26 for Ronald Reagan, and 76 for Richard Nixon. If we count foreign nationals, 35 people associated with the Donald Trump administration have been indicted from his inauguration through September 2018.
As for the story in the bottom right, it’s hard to even call it fake — Donald Trump is ‘Individual 1’.
Author note: Chris C. Martin is a co-founder of Heterodox Academy and a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology. He hosted Half Hour of Heterodoxy. You can follow him on Twitter @Chrismartin76.
