Are US conservatives more susceptible to misinformation?

Rob Bond and I have a new paper in Science Advances that explores this question. The short answer is yes, but maybe not for the reasons you might think. Asked to evaluate the veracity of hundreds of political claims over a six month period, conservatives were consistently less accurate that liberals. We further demonstrate that the media environment plays a significant role in explaining why this is. We based the statements we asked people to evaluate on news stories that got the most engagement on social media, and we found that falsehoods in that collection most often benefited conservatives, while truths tended to benefit liberals. Ultimately, our results suggest that both liberals and conservatives are biased, but that these biases have different implications for the two groups. The more conservatives believe claims that are good for their in-group, the less accurate they are; liberal who exhibit a similar bias become more accurate.

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