Expressive Responding and Fact-Opinion Discernment

• In Event: Facts, Fake News, and Resistance to the Truth

Abstract

Research suggests that partisanship interferes with peoples’ ability to distinguish between factual and opinion statements. We show that this is partly due to expressive responding: Some partisan respondents claim that congenial opinions are facts, and that uncongenial facts are opinions, because they want to express their attitude toward the statement. Four experiments in the United States and Israel (total N=10,614) show that allowing partisans to either state that a statement is (in)accurate or that they (dis)agree with it substantially reduces partisan differences in fact/opinion classifications, by about 35% in the US and 20% in Israel. Despite this, we find minimal evidence that our treatments increased the proportion of correct classifications. In other words, although expressive responding makes people look more partisan than they really are, it does not lead surveys to underestimate the average person’s ability to distinguish fact from opinion. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings.

Authors

• Matthew H Graham, Temple University

• Omer Yair, Reichman University