10:00 - 11:30
Panel Session 3
Room: Zoom
Moderator: Spyros Kosmidis
A post-truth public? Investigating the mechanisms of resistance to factual correction
Christine Stedtnitz, Rob Johns, John Bartle
University of Essex, Colchester

Many recent electoral events have been characterised by false claims which, despite abundant fact-checking, were often widely believed. This led to much talk about ’post-truth’ politics. An extensive literature confirms that political misperceptions are resistant to correction. But how far does that tendency stretch? And how do post-truth surroundings affect the way people respond to expert information that challenges political beliefs? We conducted a representative survey experiment in Britain (N=2900) concerning common misperceptions – both liberal and conservative – about immigration. We follow the classic setup of misperception-correction studies but add a twist: First, we identify false beliefs about immigration and provide expert information countering one of those false beliefs. Second, we approximate ‘real world’ conditions, where expert information is rarely the final word: We show respondents a comment from a blogger or a professor giving one of three reasons to ‘take these statistics with a big pinch of salt’. Finally, we ask respondents to re-assess the false claims and answer questions explicitly testing for a post-truth mindset. Our results show that fact-checks worked: The expert statement significantly reduced belief in the false fact. However, the post-truth comment worked, too: If the fact-checker did not have the final word – if respondents read a post-truth comment before they re-evaluated the facts – then they kept the false fact on the ’true’ side of our scale.


Reference:
Fr-P3-02
Session:
Political Communications
Presenter/s:
Christine Stedtnitz
Topic:
EU Politics
Presentation type:
Oral presentation
Room:
Zoom
Date:
Friday, 19 June
Time:
10:15 - 10:30
Session times:
10:00 - 11:30

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