Author Archives: R. Kelly Garrett

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.

Report assessing the CPD’s response to 2020 BLM protests

Researchers at the Ohio State University have released a report examining the Columbus Police Department’s response to the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. The report is based on interviews with more than 170 people, including police officers and protesters, and is divided into several chapters, covering themes such citizen-police relations, city leadership, policy and training, etc. The report culminates in more than two dozen recommendations. This is an important document, and I am honored to have played a small role as a member of the advisory team. Here’s how the report begins:

The murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by Derek Chauvin, a White Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer on May 25, 2020, sparked months-long protests about racism and policing across the country and around the globe, including Columbus, Ohio. Captured on video and spread quickly through social media, Floyd’s death galvanized Americans to take to the streets in the midst of a global health pandemic to voice their anger and frustration about the many Black Americans who had been killed by police. The fairness of policing practice as applied to communities of color, particularly Black communities, and more fundamentally, the existence of the police as a legally sanctioned public institution were the clear motivations for the protests.

A recording of a video conference held shortly before the public release of the report is available here.

New Paper – Better Crowdcoding: Strategies for Promoting Accuracy in Crowdsourced Content Analysis

I have a new paper out in Communication Methods and Measures, produced in collaboration with Ceren Budak and Daniel Sude. The work is the first in a series of studies that I’ve conducted with faculty at the University of Michigan’s School of Information examining strategies for improving content analysis conducted using crowdsourced workers (e.g., MTurk). The publisher has provided a limited number of free eprints. If you are interested, you can download a copy here.

Abstract:

In this work, we evaluate different instruction strategies to improve the quality of crowdcoding for the concept of civility. We test the effectiveness of training, codebooks, and their combination through 2 × 2 experiments conducted on two different populations – students and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. In addition, we perform simulations to evaluate the trade-off between cost and performance associated with different instructional strategies and the number of human coders. We find that training improves crowdcoding quality, while codebooks do not. We further show that relying on several human coders and applying majority rule to their assessments significantly improves performance.

Facebook funding

Erik Nisbet, Rob Bond, and I have received a grant from Facebook for about $50K to study misinformation in the 2020 election. Ours was one of 25 proposal funded out of a pool of more than 1,000 applications. The project focuses on quantifying the harms of misinformation during the election. The announcement is here: https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/08/announcing-the-winners-of-facebooks-request-for-proposals-on-misinformation-and-polarization/

The effect of on-line or memory-based processing when correcting misinformation

Dustin Carnahan and I have a new paper out in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research that uses a pair of experiments to assess how judgment processing strategies influence individuals’ response to corrections. We find that on-line processing is associated with less bias when updating beliefs in response to corrections than memory-based processing. The article doi is 10.1093/ijpor/edz037

The limited influence of corrective messages is one of the most striking observations in the misperceptions literature. We elaborate on this well-known outcome, showing that correction effectiveness varies according to recipients’ judgment strategy. Using data from two online experiments, we demonstrate that individuals’ responses to corrective messages are less biased by prior attitudes when they engage in on-line rather than memory-based processing. We also show that individuals are more responsive to one-sided messages under conditions of on-line rather than memory-based processing. Unexpectedly, two-sided messages, which repeat the inaccuracy before correcting it, performed better than one-sided messages among individuals using memory-based processes. These findings contribute to our understanding of fact-checking, and suggest strategies that could help promote greater responsiveness to corrective messages.