Modeling How Individuals Synthesize Truths and Lies About Politics

• In Event: Fake News, Misinformation, and Conspiracy Theories

Abstract

In everyday life people encounter a mix of truths, half-truths, and falsehoods. When individuals synthesize and communicate this information to others, what happens to such conflicting information? Recent work demonstrates information becomes less verbose and more distorted as it moves across individuals, but we still lack a good sense of how that information is subsequently processed and factored into political decision-making. A next step to understanding how the flow of information influences attitude formation and social learning is to model how conflicting information is evaluated, stored, and sampled from one’s working memory. In a series of experiments I present individuals with factual and misinformation across three areas in American politics where misconceptions are prevalent (immigration, climate change, and President Donald Trump). Participants read a true story and a false story on the topic then write a message about the topic to another participant. I then use content analysis of participant produced summaries to assess (1) the proportion of information carried into their summaries from true and false stories, (2) if tensions between stories are resolved or remain in participant summaries, and (3) whether individuals take strong or ambivalent positions on the issue they summarized.

Author

• Ian Shapiro, University of Colorado, Boulder