Source Credibility, Political Identity, and Factual Belief Revision

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

How do people learn about facts and revise their beliefs about the world when they learn from others who vary in their political identities and expertise? Can opposing partisans learn effectively from one another? Or do identities interfere with learning because they increase group-based biases? This research broadens our understanding of the potential causes of the polarization of opinion and their cognitive and emotional bases. The research has the potential to lead to more effective means of reducing the spread of misinformation by developing more effective interventions to de-bias learning processes and improve the accuracy of beliefs. As polarized opinions about facts are often at the core of conflicts over important public policies pertaining to the environment, health, technology, and economic welfare, this project contributes knowledge that can increase public support for beneficial policies, the likelihood of policy conflict resolution, and trust in science. The findings also have the potential to improve science communication by designing strategies tailored to address the identity-based biases. This research seeks to measure partisan source credibility effects on factual learning and to generate evidence disentangling instrumental and social identity mechanisms underlying the political and social dimensions of belief revision processes. The researchers also aim to develop a reliable and simple method for eliciting the dynamics of belief revision through online surveys. In the incentivized experimental framework, the team measures a source’s credibility in terms of the extent to which beliefs change as a function of information from that source, incorporating sources’ identities and characteristics (with real people as information sources) into the structure of a belief updating task. The scholars apply this framework in a series of related studies. Study 1 measures baseline levels of source credibility as a function of partisanship and examines how these baseline levels are correlated with attitudinal measures of partisan identity strength, knowledge, and affective polarization. Study 2 experimentally tests whether partisan bias results from instrumental or social identity mechanisms, disentangling cognition from affect. Study 3 extends our framework to expert sources and beliefs about scientific facts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.