Rob Bond, Erik Nisbet, and I have a new paper in Political Communication. We looked at how people report their exposure to and belief in political misinformation during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. To do this, we created fake but plausible political claims—some targeting Democrats, others Republicans—and tracked how participants responded over eight survey waves. What stood out was that most people didn’t show strong partisan bias, and expressive responding (saying you believe something just to support your side) was pretty rare. Interestingly, though, bias did increase slightly around the election, suggesting that politically salient event can influence how people talk about their beliefs. We can’t say whether those change reflect sincere beliefs or an uptick in expressive responding, though.

You can read the open access paper here.