Identity concerns drive belief: The impact of partisan identity on the belief and dissemination of true and false news
By Andrea Pereira, Elizabeth Harris, Jay J. Van Bavel. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 2018
102 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We test three competing theoretical accounts invoked to explain the rise and spread of political (mis)information. We compare the ideological values hypothesis (people prefer news that bolster their values and worldviews); the confirmation bias hypothesis (people prefer news that fit their preexisting stereotypical knowledge); and the political identity hypothesis (people prefer news that allow them to believe positive things about political ingroup members and negative things about political outgroup members). In three experiments (N = 1,420), participants from the United States read news describing actions perpetrated by their political ingroup or outgroup. Consistent with the political identity hypothesis, Democrats and Republicans were both more likely to believe news about the value-upholding behavior of their ingroup or the value-undermining behavior of their outgroup. Belief was positively correlated with willingness to share on social media in all conditions, but Republicans were more likely to believe and want to share apolitical fake news.
Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a198551d8206654f3e4f81bb07c43fdcdad3e2dc
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In Communication
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Citations in the corpus
- A Practical Guide to Doing Behavioral Research on Fake News and Misinformation (2020, background): “If you wish to create your own fake news stimuli (as has been done in some studies; Pereira et al., 2020), you need to take extra care to make sure that your content is similar to what is seen in everyday life – otherwise your results cannot be taken to generalize (i.e., you won’t be researching…”
- The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “The observation that people are more likely to believe information that is consistent with their political ideology/partisanship (and are less likely to believe information that is inconsistent with their ideology/partisanship) is often taken as evidence for politically motivated reasoning [22,123,1”