Does Counter-Attitudinal Information Cause Backlash? Results from Three Large Survey Experiments
By A. Guess, A. Coppock. British Journal of Political Science, 2018
227 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Several theoretical perspectives suggest that when individuals are exposed to counter-attitudinal evidence or arguments, their pre-existing opinions and beliefs are reinforced, resulting in a phenomenon sometimes known as ‘backlash’. This article formalizes the concept of backlash and specifies how it can be measured. It then presents the results from three survey experiments – two on Mechanical Turk and one on a nationally representative sample – that find no evidence of backlash, even under theoretically favorable conditions. While a casual reading of the literature on information processing suggests that backlash is rampant, these results indicate that it is much rarer than commonly supposed.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d04818a16bc74581363fa8910e141193c5766ce4
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In Political Science and International Relations
In Sociology and Political Science
- David G. Rand
- Gordon Pennycook
- S. van der Linden
- Stephan Lewandowsky
- J. Roozenbeek
- Nicholas C. Dias
- J. Pierre
- S. Michael Gaddis
In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking (2021, background): “1The “backfire” effect reported by Nyhan and Reifler (2010) has been found to be less common than initially thought (Guess & Coppock, 2018; Wood & Porter, 2018).”
- The Psychology of Fake News. (2021, background): “Despite some early evidence that correction checking could backfire and increase belief in false content [86], recent work has shown that these backfire effects are extremely uncommon and are not a cause for serious concern [87,88].”
- Combatting climate change misinformation: Evidence for longevity of inoculation and consensus messaging effects (2020, unknown): “When the correction goes against the prevailing worldview of a polarised group, this correction may even backfire, though it should be noted that the literature on backfire effects is increasingly debated (see Ecker et al., 2014; Ecker & Ang, 2019; Guess & Coppock, 2018; T. Wood & Porter, 2019).”