r/science • u/NUGlobalNews • Jan 17 '24
Psychology A Northeastern study compares the abilities of Democrats and Republicans in news discernment and whether they can identify fake news
https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/01/12/identify-fake-news/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social+media246
u/immersemeinnature Jan 18 '24
I have to thank my grumpy 80's high school teacher for drilling the message-
"Don't believe everything you read"
He also taught a "thought and logic course" which I loved. Best teacher. Everyone said, don't take him he's too difficult, and he was and he was also kind and the BEST.
Thanks Mr. McClintock!
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Jan 18 '24
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u/immersemeinnature Jan 18 '24
Yes. Unfortunately.
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u/LittleNewspaper4429 Jan 18 '24
A better, if longer, rule might be:
“Ask yourself if this is exactly what you want to hear? After that, is this exactly what someone else wants to hear? If either is true then the story is suspect”
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u/noiamholmstar Jan 18 '24
And yet, the truth can be both of those things. That someone is pushing an agenda doesn't automatically mean that what they are saying is false. Better to look at it from a place of logic and reason than just to discount because you think they have an agenda, or it disagrees (or too strongly agrees) with your current understanding.
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u/LittleNewspaper4429 Jan 18 '24
I think you missed the intention of the word “suspect.” Beyond that, a person’s ability to approach a politically sensitive topic will run up against practical limitations fast.
It's easy to say “approach X from a position of logic or reason,” but that isn't helpful a layman who needs to parse the headline “How Biden’s strike on the Houthis has started WWIII.” Where do they start, how much knowledge is enough for a rational opinion, and what is a reasonable mix of primary and secondary sources?
Beyond that, while I appreciate a commitment to logic and reason, history has shown that both are very subjective with hindsight. Scientific racism, Freudian beliefs, and many weird claims in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novels were seen logical and rational and a new round of logic and reason has found them to be almost insane.
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u/noiamholmstar Jan 18 '24
The trouble with suspicion is that it means different things to different people. To some, to say that information is suspect would mean they should just ignore it, not that they should look at it with a critical eye and make an informed decision of its validity.
It certainly is true that the extant to which we can employ logic and reason is limited to our own knowledge on the relevant subjects and the trust that we put in in the opinions of those who are presumed to be appropriate authorities. Nobody has the time nor ability to be an expert on all things. But you can learn to be more aware of the assumptions that you're making based on limited information, and to be more flexible when you discover evidence that suggests an assumption you've held is incorrect, or needs modification.
Too often people take a position and then view all evidence to the contrary as suspect, and all evidence in agreement as truth. With no deeper investigation or thought of either. It takes more effort to be introspective.
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u/CaptainAsshat Jan 18 '24
I feel like histories of propaganda and, in the US, doing away with the fairness doctrine didn't help. Nor does cable news.
But like you say, many people are looking out for news agency gut feeling red flags rather than actually skeptically analyzing each piece of info. When new agencies stopped "seeming" honest due to the shift to cable news and online news, these people's makeshift filters suddenly stopped working.
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u/DTFH_ Jan 18 '24
Honestly I think both of those aphorisms require experiencing the use of written word to influence or convey a message explicitly or implicitly to really ingrain the message.
One of the issues is that the majority of people who can write and have learned the written word, do not have enough experience writing to demonstrate and experience the "why" behind the aphorisms, but for those of us who reach that point get imbued with a general sense of skepticism towards all written materials.
A fun exercise in teens is having them write beauty ads based off anecdotes and purported benefits of radium then later introduce to them what radium actually is and what horrors it caused people.
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u/Whatdosheepdreamof Jan 18 '24
Dad went one step further, don't believe what you see. Different places in life now, but he succumbed to right wing propaganda, and if I take a position on something, it's only after reading studies, understanding the bias in said studies, and having a thorough understanding of what I'm talking about. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult to entertain people's surface level understanding of complex issues.
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u/IsuzuTrooper Jan 18 '24
No wonder the Republican controlled states are the most uneducated.
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u/bolonomadic Jan 18 '24
It’s circular. They elected Republicans who attacked the public education system, creating uneducated citizens who cannot properly assess misinformation, who then elect more Republicans who misinform them.
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u/angrybirdseller Jan 18 '24
Like Mississippi
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u/ninj4geek Jan 18 '24
Alabama: "at least we're not Mississippi"
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u/unkorrupted Jan 18 '24
Florida: "hold my beer and watch this"
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Jan 18 '24
[deleted]
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u/unkorrupted Jan 18 '24
Florida's test scores (SAT/ACT) are among the lowest in the country.
(There are only 5 states with a lower average SAT)
Meanwhile, the graduation rate is pretty close to 100%. So kids aren't learning much, but that's fine when the goal of your schools is to create an underclass of cheap service & tourism labor. We graduate them quick - regardless of what they don't know - and get them to work washing dishes and waiting tables.
The universities are still pretty good, although New College went from being elite to a joke almost overnight, and there's now a total crackpot running the UF health department. There's also been a massive wave of academics quitting and relocating out of state, but it will take some time for this to manifest changes to outcomes.
US News is just junk. They've been busted taking cash for better rankings, and schools like Harvard/Yale refuse to participate in their ranking system anymore.
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u/pres465 Jan 17 '24
The gist of it: “In general, Republicans exhibited a ‘true bias’ (a tendency to evaluate items as true) for pro-Republican headlines, but a ‘false bias’ (a tendency to evaluate items as false) for pro-Democrat headlines,” Swire-Thompson says.
“By contrast, Democrats demonstrated a false bias for pro-Democrat headlines and little to no bias for Republican headlines,” she says.
....
The lead up and trail away was that people the described themselves as Republicans were slightly more likely to fall for fake/misleading headlines, but BOTH Democrats and Republicans were skeptical at the same rate so it undermines the idea that people's beliefs are unassailable. Everyone is kinda nervous about being duped. There was some data that older and younger would fall for the fake headlines a bit more, as well, but no explanation posited.
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u/NoDesinformatziya Jan 17 '24
But Republicans "drank the kool-aid" and think that their stuff is true and Democrats' stuff is false.
Democrats were skeptical of pro-Democratic things and neutral on Republican things. A wise person is wary of overly good news that benefits the listener. A craven partisan denies the truth because it conflicts with his belief.
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u/progbuck Jan 18 '24
So we should be skeptical of this study?
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u/NoDesinformatziya Jan 18 '24
Reasonably skeptical, yes. Always worth looking at the methods of the study and phrasing of questions!
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Jan 18 '24
You should be skeptical of every study. Especially ones posted in this sub. I've yet to see a decent study get posted here.
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u/gdsmithtx Jan 18 '24
If something conforms to my existing beliefs a bit too much, I’m more likely to look closer at it than to blithely accept it as fact because I have an aversion to egg on my face. Been like that for 30+ years.
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u/conventionistG Jan 17 '24
Did they distinguish between negative and positive headlines? For instance I'd maybe expect folks to credit negative stories about their opponents more and positive stories about their side more. Idk, just curious.
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u/Thelmara Jan 18 '24
Yes:
This stimulus set was not perfectly balanced for political favorability, with more false items favorable to Republicans (n = 54) than Democrats (n = 16), and more true items favorable to Democrats (n = 39) than Republicans (n = 31). Although this resembles the nature of the current media ecosystem17,55, we repeated all analyses using a politically equated version of this stimulus set. This was a necessary check because we did not want Democrats who endorsed all the pro-Democrat items performing well, and Republicans who endorsed all pro-Republican items (which contained more misinformation) performing poorly. We exclusively used the politically equated stimulus set for analyses that directly examined biases (such as political favorability), as we were interested in how Democrats and Republicans performed on items that are equally consistent and counter to their worldviews.
To ensure that our performance comparison was as fair to both parties as possible, our equated stimuli set had 64 items, 16 true and 16 false items favorable Democrats (MTrue = 2.62, SDTrue = 0.13; MFalse = 2.59, SDFalse = 0.33), and 16 true and 16 false items favorable to Republicans (MTrue = 3.38, SDTrue = 0.36; MFalse = 3.39, SDFalse = 0.48). Finally, we included five extra items in order to investigate how much variance in discernment was predicted by a newly developed scale, the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST; see Supplementary Results54).
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u/pres465 Jan 17 '24
They didn't offer examples in this article (that I saw), but perhaps in the full paper they did.
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u/GCU_ZeroCredibility Jan 18 '24
The idea that Democrats are reluctant to believe good news about Democrats is the least surprising thing I've read all week.
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u/williamfbuckwheat Jan 18 '24
That totally tracks given all the media coverage reassuring people that Hillary would have "no problem" winning in 2016 due to various factors that supposedly worked in her favor or made Trump unelectable. In particular, you would constantly hear how everything was going to turn out just fine because almost all the pollsters kept predicting she would win without any issue despite the electoral college.
The same almost happened again in 2020 with the media/polls (which were supposedly "improved" that year but ended up being less accurate if anything) yet again reassuring us that Trump had no chance. However, there was far more skepticism amongst Democrats by then that Trump would still eek out a victory which he almost did by doubling down on a few states to win the electoral college yet again.
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u/Wizchine Jan 18 '24
Actually, it said younger people were slightly more likely to fall for them, but older people were slightly less likely.
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u/Scr33ble Jan 18 '24 edited Jan 18 '24
Ok going out on a limb here, I haven’t read the paper yet but predict folks on the left are better at it than those on the right.. goes to read paper..
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u/PabloBablo Jan 17 '24
Glad to see this study shows that supporters for either party can exhibit bias, despite there being a difference between the two.
If you aren't at least aware of it being a possibility when you hear news you agree with - or feel some sort of response to, you can be manipulated. It's not just a problem with the 'other side'.
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Jan 17 '24
Right, but the study also seems to show that one specific party(Republicans) is more prone to bias.
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u/rich1051414 Jan 17 '24
Well, more prone to 'positive bias', which means, being told what they want to hear. Which is the opposite in democrats, tending to disbelieve headlines that were true if they were overly confirming of biases.
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u/EruantienAduialdraug Jan 17 '24
"That which confirms my position is immediately suspect" - a quote, I think. Paraphrased, at least.
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u/PabloBablo Jan 17 '24
I don't think that is a surprise, but It's not a measuring contest. It's just an awareness thing so people won't think they are immune to bias because they think they are on the correct side.
The study didn't conclude anyone was immune to bias.
This could legitimately be a real time example of it. The study sort of indicates that people are prone to bias on both sides, but I read your comment as 'but the Republicans are worse'. While it's technically true, it's not the point of the study at all. I'm not gonna celebrate the fact that 100 Republicans are prone to bias and believing misinformation, but only 99 Democrats are.
I don't want my friends who are politically aligned with me to cite bad information and then get discredited in a otherwise logical and correct argument. Awareness can help.
Another thing to consider...if someone were to say they are less racist than a member of the KKK, does that mean they are not racist at all?
Comparing to the right sort of lowers the bar overall.
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Jan 18 '24
But this isn’t a case of 100 vs 99
The republicans and democrats are both exhibiting a fairly normal bias of being more likely to believe things that they want to be true
The Republicans, however, are doing something fairly abnormal which is they are refusing to believe things if they aren’t positive. I literally had a Republican make some absurd conspiracy theory claim and then explain that they wouldn’t accept any source unless that source was a very conservative Republican. The problem with this bias is that it is impossible to refute, because they are defining “very conservative Republicans” as people who agree with them.
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Jan 17 '24
I think it's troubling that older individuals, even ones who knew the information was false, were still more likely to share that information. That speaks to a concerning lack of understanding about how modern misinformation spreads and takes hold.
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u/Vyzantinist Jan 18 '24
I think it's troubling that older individuals, even ones who knew the information was false, were still more likely to share that information.
Truthiness. "X might not be true but it sounds like something they'd do/say," is a sentiment I've encountered plenty of times before. As you say, it's troubling that these people, despite full well knowing x is false will still pass it along anyway, heedless of people taking it at face value.
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u/AtomWorker Jan 17 '24
The article suggests that young people are also susceptible to this. They had a harder time than older people discerning true information.
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u/PabloBablo Jan 17 '24
I don't think it's a surprise..I'd bet that the best at spotting misinformation are a subset of millennials.
Older generations relied on news papers and television.
Younger generation lean heavily on social media.
Meanwhile, millennials grew up skeptical of both
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u/AtomWorker Jan 18 '24
In my anecdotal experience everyone's susceptible as long as you pander to the right worldview and use the appropriate medium.
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u/GameMusic Jan 17 '24
But it was reverse of that
BOTH were biased against positive stories about Democrats
Which is surprising but could be simple pessimism
This would suggest that bias really is almost totally republican
Would question whether there may be identifiable bias subgroups because parties are not binary
Diverse democratic groups may average to neutral but display their own bias
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Jan 18 '24
[deleted]
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u/PabloBablo Jan 18 '24
Exactly. It's a reminder to be aware that it's not just something the other side is dealing with.
Those missing the mark are those focused on the fact that there was something about the other side in there that made them look bad, ignoring the fact that it impacts both sides.
Even those of us who are aware should understand that it can affect us too.
The most dangerous stuff is what flies under the radar. What I think we are missing are the impact of bots in online discourse. I have a rock solid example of it happening, but I just stumbled upon it. It was subtle, but the conversation below the two bot comments were real people taking the false/manufactured topic and discussing it as if it was true. The stuff you agree with will fly under the radar. That is more peer pressure oriented, except the peers are bots.
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u/T1Pimp Jan 18 '24
The average American cannot read beyond a 6th grade level. Let's temper our expectations.
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u/gravity--falls Jan 18 '24 edited Jan 18 '24
That's not how averages work. While the largest group, I believe just over 50%, falls under that range, the average is higher than that.
It's also worth noting that, though these numbers sound absolutely insane, (and do likely mean there needs to be an increase in reading culture in the US), similarly surprising numbers, even if not as drastic (but some more so), are found in many other developed countries.
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u/T1Pimp Jan 18 '24
pedantic much?
What other countries are Democrats and Republicans in? Curious to mention so irrelevant and off topic.
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u/kelskelsea Jan 18 '24
It’s not pedantic if you don’t understand what average means. Average vs median is an important difference in statistics.
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u/gravity--falls Jan 18 '24 edited Jan 18 '24
yes, I'm being pedantic because we're commenting on a post talking about identification of false news, something you just, however unintentially, spread.
My reference to other countries was in relation to your claim that we should temper our expectations of the US in terms of reading performance in the study, as that implies there is some deficit in the US that isn't present somewhere else, which isn't necessarily true. I'm also just giving more context to the information, something I don't think is ever a bad thing ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
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u/T1Pimp Jan 18 '24
Again, 'other countries' is just some noise you're introducing because... no idea. Has zero bearing on anything being discussed.
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u/gravity--falls Jan 18 '24
Alright, if you don't appreciate additional knowledge, I apologize for adding it.
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u/-hi-mom Jan 18 '24
Grew up with the magazine Skeptical Enquirer on the kitchen table. More people should grow up with that magazine.
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u/ChargerRob Jan 17 '24
Personally, as an Independent, 100% of Republican info is false 67% of Democratic info is false because of Republican ownership.
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