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Political bias is more important than truth among news consumers


Highlighting the challenges of dealing with disinformation, a new study published last month by Stanford University researchers suggests that partisan bias often outweighs the truth in influencing how people consume news.

While it may seem unsurprising to those who have been paying close attention, the findings published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General challenge the assumption that only less-educated, conservative-leaning individuals are susceptible to disinformation or bias.

“What we found was that even with outrageous headlines — where you’d expect truth to have a significant impact — political concordance (how the information aligns with personal beliefs) still mattered twice as much,” said study co-author Geoffrey Cohen, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. “We all know political concordance can be important, but we don’t fully realize just how much it matters and how little truthfulness matters relative to what we think it should.”

The study was conducted alongside fellow psychology professor Michael Schwalbe through 15- to 20-minute online interviews over two months prior to the 2022 midterm elections. It was published during a heated and closely contested presidential campaign between Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump, who is attempting to return to the White House after his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

Questions mainly revolved around accurate and false stories regarding Trump.

“It was the extent to which participants supported or opposed Trump. We created four types of news stories in a two-by-two design: some were pro-Trump, some were anti-Trump, some were fake, and some were true,” Cohen said. “We developed these news stories ourselves and had a U.S. census-matched sample read the various headlines. They evaluated the truthfulness of each story, how much they believed them, and how likely they were to share them.”



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