A recent study from Carnegie Mellon University reveals that both Republican and Democratic voters often defend politicians’ false statements if those statements match their own political beliefs. The study, based on online surveys conducted mostly during Donald Trump’s presidency, found that people from both parties justified politicians’ inaccuracies when they aligned with their moral views.
“What we found is that political misinformation isn’t just about whether voters can tell facts from fiction,” the researchers explain. “It seems like it’s more about how statements, whether true or not, speak to a broader political agenda.”
Partisan perspectives
The researchers conducted six surveys to understand how voters react to politicians’ statements that disregard factual accuracy in favor of socially divisive “truths.” These surveys, conducted primarily during Donald Trump’s presidency, recruited participants from platforms like Amazon’s Cloud Research Platform and Prolific.
Each survey assessed participants’ responses to false statements made by politicians like Trump, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, President Joe Biden, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The results consistently showed that partisans tended to support these factually inaccurate statements, justifying them morally instead of relying on factual justification. Additionally, voters seemed to differentiate between objective evidence and their perceived truth, favoring the latter when assessing statements from favored politicians.
Interestingly, the last two surveys revealed significant moral flexibility among both Democrats and Republicans. This challenges the notion that partisan reactions to misinformation are solely due to laziness or bias. Instead, voters demonstrate flexibility with both facts and morals, often justifying politicians’ fact-flouting as a means of asserting political “truths.”
While most Trump supporters showed factual flexibility regarding his statements, a survey specifically focused on the “big lie” – Trump’s claims about the 2020 election being rigged – showed less moral flexibility among his supporters. Participants in this survey tended to perceive Trump’s allegations as grounded in objective evidence, suggesting less willingness to justify this particular misinformation.
Varied importance
However, the degree of emphasis on factual accuracy varied based on individuals’ political affiliations, indicating that political misinformation persists regardless of efforts to distinguish fact from fiction.
The study’s authors acknowledge limitations, including the narrow focus on one type of political misinformation and the lack of national representativeness in the samples. Additionally, their measurement and analysis methods were novel and lacked a proven track record.
“Our findings reiterate the sociological insight that commitment to democratic norms cannot be assumed and indicate the importance of that caution when it comes to the problem of political misinformation,” the researchers conclude.
“In particular, efforts to combat voters’ positive response to misinformation cannot be limited to teaching them to simply work harder to digest accurate information (e.g., fact-checking).”
