Inferences from Corrected Facts to Nowhere

• In Event: Experiments in Information and Accountability

Abstract

Most normative models of democracy are premised on a citizenry that is responsive to factual information (Mill 1895, Berelson et al. 1954). This responsiveness entails a willingness to correct factual misperceptions about the world if offered credible information that runs counter to ones factual beliefs. This claim have motivated research that both fails (Kuklinski and Hurley, 1994; Kuklinski et al., 1998; Nyhan and Reifler, 2010, 2016), and succeeds (Esberg et al. 2020, Larsen and Olsen 2020) in correcting citizens' misperceptions. If a factual misperception about the world is corrected, then a set of subsequent inferences should follow including evaluation of government performance and policy preferences for the domain of the now correctly perceived facts (Downs 1957, Fiorina 1981, Ferejohn 1986, Achen and Bartels 2017). Yet, information interventions have sometimes failed to affect accountability mechanisms (Dunning et al. 2019), and have had limited or mixed effects on policy preferences (Gilens 2001, Green et al. 2011, Hopkins et al. 2019, Esberg et al. 2020).

We provide evidence from a large and scalable field experiment (N=12,000) with factual statistical information to Danish citizens on twelve important valence issues spanning crime, health, education, transportation and more. The setting and issues provide a fertile ground for corrections and related inferences. First, unlike most studies, the issues are non-contentious with low levels of partisan polarization. Accordingly, correcting ones beliefs do not affect ones partisan identity. Second, in order to ease the inferential leap to updated policy preferences, the treatment material closely links corrective information with policy solutions that promise further improvements. Third, the post treatment survey asks for rather narrow inferences that directly relates questions of government responsibility and policy preferences to the information domain of the factual treatments. In sum, we provide real-world evidence from a setting that makes it is easy for citizens to correct misperceptions and at the same time provide a heavy helping hand for them to update adjacent inferences.

We find that factual statistical information about a long range of issues produce moderate to large corrections of misperceptions. However, these corrected misperceptions have very few down-stream effects on evaluation of government performance, beliefs about the mutability of the underlying issue, and policy preferences related to the facts. Essentially, corrected misperceptions, for the most part, produce inferences to nowhere. The fact that corrected misperceptions are largely muted in their wider inferential consequences for non-polarized issues in a mature democracy raises deep concerns about the usefulness of informational interventions for most other issues and in most other settings around the world.

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Author

• Asmus Leth Olsen, University of Copenhagen