WhatsApping the Theft of an Idol: How Hostile Misinformation Shapes Social Attitudes

• In Event: Religion and Politics in India

Abstract

How does misinformation on social media affect inter-group polarization? Existing
research, drawing primarily on evidence from the United States, has improved our un-
derstanding of the reasoning process surrounding misinformation messages and whether
and how these messages can be corrected. But there is less systematic research on the
broader consequences of misinformation on people’s inter-group attitudes. We study
the effect of misinformation on social attitudes with data from a vignette experiment
embedded in a representative post-election survey conducted in West Bengal, India.
We use the vignette to randomly assign respondents to a misinformation message that
invokes salient identity cleavages, as well as corrective information, and explore the
downstream effect on social attitudes. We find that citizens receiving the misinforma-
tion prime report more hostile attitudes towards out-groups compared to those who
did not receive the prime. Corrective information fails to mitigate these negative ef-
fects, suggesting that the effect of misinformation may not operate through citizens’
factual perceptions. A mediation analysis confirms that misinformation worsens out-
group attitudes largely through arousing prejudice rather than factual misperceptions
that would merely require correcting. While it is known that directional motives aid
the proliferation of misinformation messages on social media, our study shows that the
misinformation itself can exacerbate these cleavages and deepen polarization

Authors

• Neeraj Vimal Prasad, University of Amsterdam

• Ursula E. Daxecker, University of Amsterdam