RAND finds that Republicans swallow fake news more than Democrats

A RAND study released this week offers more evidence that “both-sidesism” does not belong in an honest discussion of fake news and propaganda in the U.S. People on the Right are simply more apt to fall for it than those on the Left, the research shows, and for a number or reasons. Susceptibility to conspiracy theories and fake news has already been linked by researchers to people in minority groups and lower income brackets. And higher income, higher education levels, and whiteness have been linked to greater resistance to such beliefs. But linking the appetite for, and susceptibility to, fake news and propaganda to Republicanism has until now been elusive. “We found some of it on both sides, on the left and the right,” says RAND researcher and report author Luke Matthews. “But we found more of it on the Trump voting Republican side.” The researchers surveyed 1,333 Americans from a carefully balanced set of demographic groups from February 26 through March 13, 2019. Respondents who had internet access took an online survey; those who didn’t were provided a tablet computer on which to respond to questions. RAND sat out to find what kinds of cognitive bias and reasoning functionality were most reliably associated with susceptibility to misinformation in different kinds of people. “Cognitive biases” are “systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment,” says the Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. RAND screened for a number of bias types, including “ingroup bias,” which refers to tendencies to lean toward beliefs favored by groups that share a “language, religion, or nationality.” The researchers also looked for connections between people’s comfort level with numbers, or science, or “magical thinking” and the propensity for believing misinformation. As it turned out, Matthews tells me, it was the presence or absence of these reasoning abilities that provided the best predictors of people’s susceptibility to misinformation. It found–not surprisingly–that people who demonstrated more numeric and scientific literacy, and less magical reasoning, were less likely to swallow misinformation and disinformation. And it found these people collected in certain demographic and political groups. “Resistance to Truth Decay . . . was associated with having a higher income, identifying as White, voting for Clinton in 2016, and being less religious,” the report states. By “truth decay” RAND means, broadly, a willingness to believe falsehoods, and a resistance to authoritative sources of information such as scientists and other experts. The reasoning processes that are predictive of belief in things like “birtherism,” “plandemic,” and “trutherism” are not gained or lost suddenly with the support of a particular candidate or cause, the report stresses, but rather are “developed over an individual’s lifetime and are all at least somewhat adaptive . . .” This, of course, points to the role of the education system to teach things like critical thinking and media literacy to children and adolescents early and often. “Society needs to be better at developing informed and critically thinking citizens who can appropriately process the rapid media environments in which information consumers must now operate,” the report authors write. RAND’s GOP-misinformation connection is made even more credible because the RAND researchers didn’t go out looking for that specifically. “That’s not what we set out to study but that’s what we found,” Matthews tells Fast Company. He said his team had to study all possible connections between demographic and political groups to make sure the connections they found could not be undercut by claims that “truth decay” is actually caused by some factor the group didn’t study. The report is part of RAND’s Countering Truth Decay initiative, which considers the diminishing role of facts and analysis in political and civil discourse and the policymaking process. The original report in the series was published in January 2018 and laid out a research agenda for studying and developing solutions to the Truth Decay challenge. “We need to have these political conversations and debates,” Matthews says. “We can have the debate about politics and policy, we can have political disagreements and disagreements over values, but we need to have a basic agreement about what the facts actually are.” This aspect of American life, the capacity for citizens to argue well and respectfully, is arguably what has made American democracy work. That public trust has been badly diminished. “Politics has gotten so hyperpartisan,” Matthews says. “It’s gotten people detached from what facts actually are.”

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