Conservatives' Sensitivity to Political Misunderstandings

Science Advances 02 Jun 2021:

Vol. 7, no. 23, eabf1234

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abf1234

Commentary

This study focused on capturing the richness of the political information environment in an unintentionally narrow set of asserted beliefs.

It is believed that U.S. conservatives are likely to hold their own misconceptions, which have not been systematically assessed, and the factors contributing to this performance gap will be unknown.

We generated and examined a unique longitudinal dataset that combines social media engagement data with a 12-wave panel survey of Americans' political knowledge of high-profile news stories over a six-month period.

The results showed that conservatives were less sensitive than liberals and performed worse at distinguishing truth from falsehood. This partially explains the fact that widely shared false information promotes conservative positions, while true information usually favors liberals.

This is problematic because it is exacerbated by the tendency of liberals to be significantly more sensitive than conservatives when it comes to a greater proportion of partisan news. This result underscores the importance of reducing the supply of misinformation on the right.