(Roughly) Daily

Joshua Benton on the way that we handle misinformation as elections stakes rise…

… Giving someone a meaningful incentive on a mental problem can lead them to work harder and have a better chance of getting it right. That’s also true for a very specific kind of mental problem: figuring out whether to believe some random headline you see on social media….

[Benton cites several studies that conform this generalization…]

There’s a consistent thread here: If people don’t see a reason to bring their full mental capacity to bear on a question, they probably won’t. We’re lazy! But when the stakes are a little higher — when there’s a little more reason to bring our A-game — we can do better.

Let’s transfer that idea into politics. After all, there’s usually no direct reward for sussing out a fake headline in your News Feed, or for detecting when a claim about a politician edges from plausible to laughable. In day-to-day life, a single bit of political wrongness is unlikely to impact your life one whit. So why summon up the brain power?

But what if the stakes were suddenly higher — say, just hypothetically, if it was a presidential election season and the country is being presented with two wildly different potential futures? Would people then summon up more of their mental capacity to separate good information from bad? Pundits have long said most voters only “get serious” about an election a few weeks before the big day — maybe that new seriousness might mean a stricter adherence to the facts?

That’s one of the issues addressed by a new paper by Charles Angelucci, Michel Gutmann, and Andrea Prat — of MIT, Northwestern, and Columbia, respectively. Its title is “Beliefs About Political News in the Run-up to an Election“; here’s the abstract, emphasis mine:

This paper develops a model of news discernment to explore the influence of elections on the formation of partisan-driven parallel information universes. Using survey data from news quizzes administered during and outside the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the model shows that partisan congruence’s impact on news discernment is substantially amplified during election periods. Outside an election, when faced with a true and a fake news story and asked to select the most likely true story, an individual is 4% more likely to choose the true story if it favors their party; in the days prior to the election, this increases to 11%.

Did you catch that? People aren’t more likely to evaluate accuracy correctly during the fever pitch of an election season — they’re less likely, and by a meaningful margin…

[Benton explains the methodology of the study and explores some examples of it more specific findings…]

… In a sense, it all comes down to what you mean by “high stakes.” Yes, a presidential election is high stakes for the country at large. But believing something that supports your ideological priors is high stakes for your ego — especially at the height of an all-consuming campaign. Our brains want to believe the best about our side and the worst about the other. And it seems that overrides any extra incentive for accuracy at the moment our votes matter most…

“Are people more likely to accurately evaluate misinformation when the political stakes are high? Haha, no,” from @jbenton and @NiemanLab.

* François de la Rochefoucauld, Maximes

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As we think, we might spare a thought for Andrew Russell “Drew” Pearson; he died on this date in 1969. A journalist known for his long-running column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

At the time of Pearson’s death (of a heart attack) in Washington, D.C., the column was syndicated to more than 650 newspapers, more than twice as many as any other, with an estimated 60 million readers, who devoured the investigative and “insider”-centered approach to political coverage that Pearson pioneered– and that has become the milieu for the misinformation discussed above. A Harris Poll commissioned by Time magazine at that time showed that Pearson was America’s best-known newspaper columnist. The column was continued by Jack Anderson and then by Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift, who combine commentary with historical perspectives. It is the longest-running syndicated column in America.